


Syrup & Honey

by starlightment



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Breaking Up & Making Up, Crossing Timelines, Cute, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Exes, Exes to Lovers, Family, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Getting Back Together, Happy Ending, Humor, I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH THAT THIS WILL HAVE A HAPPY ENDING, Idiots in Love, Insecure Lance (Voltron), Keith (Voltron) Angst, Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Lance (Voltron) Angst, Lance (Voltron) is a Mess, M/M, Minor Character Death, Musician Keith (Voltron), Mutual Pining, Pining, Post-Break Up, Romance, Unresolved Romantic Tension, klance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-01-04 18:20:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 61,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21202007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlightment/pseuds/starlightment
Summary: When Lance moves back home to take over his grandmother’s highly-acclaimed coffee shop, he quickly realizes there’s a bigger issue than the struggle of carrying out his family legacy. Namely, his annoyingly handsome ex-boyfriend, who also happens to own the rowdy, customer-stealing gastropub that just opened up next door. Lance is determined to taste sweet success, but with memories of his romantic past making an unfortunate comeback, it seems like there might be more than just coffee brewing between them.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so, so, so excited to finally share this story with everyone! It's extremely near and dear to my heart, and I hope it finds a little place in yours, as well. :)

**. . .**

**now.**

When Lance thinks back on it — like, really lets himself deep-dive into the ancient archives of what has been, up until now, the sad, low-budget version of the life he always imagined he’d live — everything always seems to lead him right back to the same place: _here_.

_Here_ is his abuela’s renowned coffee shop in the heart of Manhattan, where Lance is fairly certain he used to spend more time than his actual childhood house in Brooklyn. And here, on these very marbled countertops, is where a younger Lance once sat, with scraped knees and missing teeth, while his abuela taught him everything she knows. He’d watch in absolute wonder as she kneaded pastry dough with her dextrous hands, and ground coffee beans into a fine dust, and drizzled dashes of piloncillo syrup over honeyed milk and frothy foam like it was a work of art.

_Just a little bit of syrup and honey, niño_, she used to tell him, auburn hair peppered with grey and always curled into wild ringlets around her face. Then, accentuated by a lipsticked kiss to the tip of his nose: _That’s all you need to make it extra sweet._

Here, Lance thinks, is _home_.

It’s just that he never thought he’d be returning to it so soon, and least of all like _this_ — a disappointment. A failure. A grad school drop-out. Pathetic.

No one has actually come out and said it yet, in those exact words, but sometimes Lance swears he can read it between the lines of his siblings’ texts when they say things like _my office is looking for interns_, can hear a distant strain of it in his mother’s worried voice whenever she calls to say _you’re not eating enough, you used to call more, are you taking your meds?_

“I wanna take over the café,” Lance had told her that day over the phone, and the line had gone very quiet. Too quiet. “Mama? You there? I said I wanna —”

“Yes, sweetheart, I heard you.”

“So, can I?”

She had sighed, then, static in his ear. 

“I just wish you’d go a little easier on yourself, Lance.”

But when he had listened to her say it, when the words translated inside his brain, he heard it as _I don’t think you can handle it. _

“Look.” He remembers squeezing the phone so hard his hands shook. “Lita’s retiring, and who knows what’ll happen to the place if we sell it. I can’t just sit around here anymore, Mama, I’m going nuts. I want —” _A distraction, a purpose, a way to make you all proud of me again, something, anything, please, please._ “—to come home.”

So Lance does, and he’s never felt more like that wonderstruck little boy than he does back here, in this city, in this moment. If the café had been the start of everything before, then maybe it’ll be the start of everything again. Lance can hope, at least. He _has_ to. Because it might just be the only thing he has left to lose. 

Now, standing here, in the café he can officially call _his_, Lance hears the dainty jingle of the bell as the door is thrust open in a grand rush. And, spinning soundly on his heel, he very nearly shrieks at the sight.

“Did someone order a new pastry chef?” booms a voice.

“Hunk!” he does, in fact, shriek.

Lance is suddenly being charged at, and then scooped up by two very large, bone-crushing arms. The nostalgia rams into him just as bodily when he tucks his face into his best friend’s neck and realizes, quite sappily, that he still smells the same; that sweetly specific combination of cinnamon and shortbread. 

“Never leave me again,” snivels Hunk.

“I won’t let go, Jack,” Lance whispers breathlessly in reply. 

They part just enough for Hunk to give a low, appreciative whistle, but even then he keeps an arm slung around Lance’s shoulder. “Whoa,” he says, gaze roaming the room. “Get a load of this place.”

Lance, preening under the praise, says, “She cleans up pretty nice, huh?” 

“Your abuela’s gonna love it, Lance.”

“She better. Only took me three all-nighters and, like, five separate trips to Ikea to get things back in shape, but, hey, look —” He motions to the buttery yellow wall across from them, still glossy and waiting to dry. “—no more chipped paint. And these floorboards?” Then, in demonstration, a foot stomp. “Not a squeak to be heard, m’dude — _oh!_ And check out _this_ lovely lady.” 

Lance all but prances behind the counter, where he’s cozying right up to a brand new, ultra-shiny espresso machine. “Digitally-controlled boilers, sleek multi-function display, state-of-the-art gravimetric technology to weigh the shots in real time — _god_. Tell me this isn’t, like, _the_ sexiest thing you’ve ever seen.” 

“Should I give you two a moment?” asks Hunk.

“It’s about to get _steamy_ in here, Hunk,” Lance says, with a downright salacious curl of his lip. “_Real_ steamy.”

“Oh, jeez, I almost forgot.” From his bag, Hunk brandishes a large bottle of champagne, a curly blue bow wrapped around the neck. “Just a little congratulatory libation for the new business owner.”

“Aw, _buddy_,” Lance croons, touched. 

“Shay insisted.”

“So how _are_ you and the future missus doing, by the way?” he asks. 

“Awesome. Like, _really_ awesome,” Hunk sighs, like he’s a lovesick freshman all over again, scurrying back to the dorm to talk Lance’s ear off about that cute girl in his Art History class, pillow clutched to his chest with glee. He prattles on, endlessly thrilled, “You gotta come see the new apartment, Lance, you won’t believe it. We’ll have you over for dinner this week, okay? It’s got a real, actual fireplace, and if you squint, you can _almost_ see Central Park from the bedroom window.” 

“‘Course you can, you big spender!”

A brief, comfortable silence settles over them.

And then, softly:

“You look good, man,” Hunk tells him, eyes crinkled fond at the corners. “Really. You do.”

Lance is wearing his least favorite jeans, and a paint-splattered NYU t-shirt, neckline stretched and drooping off his left shoulder from years of overuse. So when those words sink in, warm and honest, Lance — wearing his ugliest clothes, and a smile he can actually feel in his gut for the first time in months — believes him.

“Thanks, buddy,” he says. “I _feel_ good. New and improved, y’know?” He adds, with quiet, vow-like resolve, “I’m gonna get things right this time.”

It’s followed by a very loud, very wet sniffle.

“Hunk,” warns Lance.

“You know I can’t _help_ _it_ —”

“No — _don’t_ — dude, if you start crying, then _I’ll_ start crying, okay, just — oh, _c’mon_ —”

Once again, Lance is engulfed in a mighty hug, and Hunk’s voice is blubbering right in his ear, “There he is! That’s my guy!”

He wobbles as his feet touch solid ground again, disoriented but happy.

“Hey, let’s head to that new place next door and celebrate with some _real_ drinks,” offers Hunk. “My treat.”

* * *

If not for the muted thump of a grooving bass line rattling the walls, intermingled with the faint rumblings of rowdy barroom prattle, Lance probably would’ve mistaken the venue next door for an abandoned warehouse of some sort. The entire storefront is windowless, painted black from roof to concrete, and eerily enigmatic at a glance. Not even the entrance seems particularly inviting — just a single, dungeon-style door, camouflaged in the gloom like a portal into some creepy, alien netherworld. Above it hangs a glowing neon sign that reads _Luxite_, with the _x_ stylized as a pair of crossed blades.

Lance takes the place in, remembering it at eight years old, back when it used to be a laundromat with bright tiled floors and plastic furniture. His abuela would so often gift him with a fistful of quarters from the tip jar — something sweetly secretive in the slant of her grin — so that he, Rachel, and Marco could treat themselves to gumballs and candy bracelets from the coin dispensers next door. At fourteen, Lance remembers an afternoon spent slouching in one of those stiff plastic benches, staring at someone’s laundry spin in dizzying circles to match the dizziness in his head as he tried to figure out why his friend Jackson had kissed him that day after swim team practice, and why he had liked it so much. There’s a padlock and a ‘for rent’ sign on the laundromat’s door the following year, and every year after that — until this one, apparently. The realization tweaks oddly and suddenly in Lance’s chest. It makes him feel like he’s been gone longer than he actually has. Makes him feel a bit like a stranger in his own skin.

Despite Luxite’s unassuming exterior, the place turns out to be a real hidden gem. Several industrial-looking lamp fixtures dangle from the ceiling, casting strange shadows and a glare of enchanting amber light against the brick walls. At the far end of the room, surrounded by tables and leather-upholstered lounge seats, there’s a lowered stage where a live band is jamming out to what sounds like an above-average rendition of some _Silversun Pickups_ song. The main floor is considerably packed with gaggles of lively guests as they holler and laugh and clink their glasses together, and so Lance and Hunk make their way over to the bar. Three ladies are working behind the sleek granite counter, each of them weaving so fluidly with and around one another that their movements appear almost synchronized, like a graceful and intimately well-oiled machine.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” greets the bartender closest to them. Her silver-toned hair is piled high into a stylish bun, loose strands of it falling against her highlighted cheekbones. A dark, dewy complexion. Glittery but tasteful eyeshadow. Knee-high stiletto boots. “My name’s Allura. Welcome to Luxite.”

“Hi,” says Hunk.

“Why, _hello_,” comes Lance’s low, amorous purr.

Allura smiles primly. “What can I get started for you?” she asks.

“Two whiskey gingers would be —”

“Hold up,” Lance cuts in, eyes narrowing as he jabs an accusing finger across the bar. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

A sigh brushes past the bartender’s lips, the sound of it lost amongst the music, but still visible in the slump of her shoulders. She looks tragically unamused, and rightfully so, if the lecherous stares from all the other half-drunk patrons seated at the bar are any indication. “No,” she says firmly through her teeth. “I don’t believe we’ve met before.”

“_Huh_,” Lance breathes, a bit incredulous, because there _is_ something unnervingly familiar about this girl. He squints even harder at her scowling face, trying to piece things together as blindly as stumbling through the dark, until — “Yeah, guess you must be right,” he relents. “I’d never let someone as gorgeous as _you_ get away.”

Her glare flickers over to Hunk, brows raised as if demanding an explanation.

With a spurt of awkward laughter, Hunk gives Lance’s back a sympathetic pat, and says, “Uh, y’see, my pal Lance has had kind of a rough year.”

“I’m fine!” squawks Lance, defensive. He swivels around in his barstool with an indignant huff, but he can still feel Hunk’s palm on his spine, how it sears through the fabric of his shirt, stinging in the worst way, like _pity_. “Look, okay, things were rough for, like, maybe five months. Six, _tops_. But that’s — whatever, y’know? All of that's in the past. _Now_ I’m fine. _Fantastic_, even! Like, this is by far the best I’ve ever —”

The moment that follows stills like the eye of a storm, suspended midair, while everything else flurries around him at a maddening pace. The band ends their song. The guitar’s final cry ricochets off the walls. The crowd cheers, claps, bangs their empty beer glasses on the tables with fervor. And Lance is adrift somewhere in the dead center of it all. His gaze combs over the commotion, molasses-slow, until he comes across a lone silhouette near the entrance, blurred by shadow and leaning against the exposed brick, clapping along in polite appreciation.

Lance is hallucinating. Yes, that’s it. He decides it for himself, right then and there, as if thinking it hard enough will simply make it so, or clear away the image before him as if it were a pesky cobweb clinging to his brain. He blinks, so aggressively that his lids ache with the effort. But then the silhouette turns its head toward a faint patch of overhead light, and everything is revealed all at once: the sharp cut of a jawline, a pair of softly bowed lips, a flickering glint of star-bright eyes. 

And _that_ — that’s all it takes for Lance’s stomach to take a violent plummet to his knees. One dreadful, startling, gut-wrenching spark of realization before his heart is throbbing in his ears, and his fingers are white-knuckling around nothing, and his entire universe snaps back into motion with a brutal lurch that almost knocks him readily to the floor because —

“_Fucking shit_,” Lance rasps eloquently.

At his side, Hunk perks up. “Huh?”

But Lance is already jerking himself back around with more force than necessary, face gone pale and panicked, practically screeching, “Well, that’s enough fun for one night, don’tcha think!” He lunges for his drink without warning, and guzzles the whole thing down in three thick gulps. Then he takes care of Hunk’s untouched glass in the same fashion, gagging on the painful burn of it, eyes watering profusely.

“Dude…” mutters Hunk, like he’s both greatly disturbed and deeply impressed.

“_Mm_. Tasty. Delicious,” Lance grunts, still struggling not to vomit as he wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “We’ll go ahead and close the tab now, thanks —”

Hunk is grabbing his arm, grip bruising with concern. “What’s gotten into you, man?” 

Lance flips the hood of his jacket over his head, hiding his flustered face, and then grumbles under his breath. 

“Uh, sorry, didn’t catch that,” says Hunk.

“_Keithishere_.”

“Lance. Seriously. I can’t even hear you when you mumble like —”

“Keith. Is. _Here_.”

The outburst garners a few curious head turns from nearby patrons, which doesn’t seem to aggravate Lance nearly as much as Hunk’s loud, horrified gasp does. Even Allura is wearing a look of wide-eyed shock, fingertips pressed to her lips in an attempt to mask the way her jaw drops open quite unbecomingly. 

“Oh,” she murmurs, like something awful has just dawned on her. “You’re _that_ Lance.”

His first instinct is to splutter, vaguely insulted. “_That_ Lance? _That Lance?_ What's that supposed to —” But then, something clicks. His furrowed expression unfurls into sheer bewilderment. “—wait, you know Keith?”

“He’s my boss,” she tells him solemnly.

“He runs this place?!”

“With his brother, yes.”

Lance switches gears so urgently that it nearly gives him whiplash. He rounds on Hunk like a beast on the hunt, eyes frighteningly wide and refusing to blink. “Of _all_ the bars you could’ve dragged me to —”

“I had no idea, dude, honest!” Hunk babbles away, hands raised in a very willing surrender. “I heard about Shiro opening his new place somewhere close by, but I didn’t think it’d be, like…” he cringes. “…_this_ close.” 

“Okay,” Lance grits out, striving to remain calm while his belly flips and flops in all sorts of weird ways. “Okay, okay. We — We just gotta find a way out before he sees us, right? Easy-peasy.” He throws his gaze to Allura, imploring and slightly frantic. “Hey, crazy question, but you wouldn’t happen to know of any _super-secret_ back doors around here, would you? Maybe like a nice, inconspicuous air duct we can quickly shimmy our way through or…?”

Her brow quirks suspiciously. “The back door is in the kitchen, and for employees _only_,” she informs them. 

“Right, right. For sure. Makes sense,” Lance is saying agreeably, all the way up until Allura turns her back to resume her work, at which point he’s smacking a handful of bills onto the counter, and seizing Hunk by the arm, muttering fiercely, “Hunk, we are busting outta that kitchen door, _pronto_.”

“But —” Hunk stumbles as he’s hauled off his stool, and further into the room. “—she just said it’s for employees only.”

“We _are_ employees,” argues Lance, and then, going off his friend’s puzzled glare, “Of a different establishment, whatever, but that’s on _her_ for not clarifying the fine print.”

“Lance, buddy, you know I’m only saying this out of love, but this plan seems a little —”

“Dammit, I’ve lost visual,” Lance hisses, eyes scouring the main entrance where Keith is now, alarmingly, nowhere to be found. “Regroup! _Regroup_!”

Another merciless tug to Hunk’s arm sends them both diving, tumbling, and then crawling across the floor. And it’s this drastic maneuver — the one that has them crouching behind the nearest dining table like a pair of rollicking _idiots_ — that finally wears Hunk’s saint-like patience too thin. Down here, on his knees, he turns to Lance with a piercing glower.

“So if Keith is gone,” he grunts, “then remind me why we can’t just — oh, I dunno — use the front door?”

“‘Cause it’s way too _risky_,” Lance snipes back at once. “I mean, he could literally be anywhere right now. Lurking around dark corners, suspended from the ceiling, spiderman-style. Dude’s stealthier than a friggin’ assassin, man, seriously, it’s creepy as hell.”

“Are you hearing yourself right now? Are you _actually_ hearing the crazy?”

“It’s not _my_ fault. He’s not even supposed to _be_ here.”

“But you can’t just avoid him forever,” counters Hunk. “Especially now that he’s your work neighbor.”

“_God_,” Lance tosses his head back, cursing the heavens, “of all the bars!”

Hunk cuts the histrionics short by lifting a very stern finger, letting the tip of it hover threateningly right in front of Lance’s nose. “Now you listen to me, young man —”

“Don’t _dad voice_ me in the middle of a breakout mission!”

“You can either roll around on the floor and cause a scene, or you can just hike up your big boy pants and walk out of here like a normal person. I, for one, will be using the front door, and you are more than welcome to join me.”

After a brief moment of deliberation, Lance pulls a face at him. “Okay, but define _normal_ —”

“I’ll meet you outside in ten,” sighs Hunk.

“No, no, wait —” Lance tries towing him back, grappling at the sleeve of his jacket, but to no avail. So, instead, he sneers at his retreating back, “—_traitor_!” 

Only then does he realize he’s on his feet again, in plain sight — and is also being viciously judged by the group of people directly to his left, who just so happen to be the occupants of the table he’d just been huddled beneath. They gawk at him, and Lance gawks back, until he spots their cluttered tabletop, and is instantly struck with inspiration.

“Evening, folks, don’t mind me.” He begins collecting as many empty glasses as he can reach. “Just stopping by to take these back into the kitchen.”

Then, while his hands are sufficiently full of dirtied glassware, he wheels himself around just as someone is walking past. They collide so hard, and Lance is startled so bad, that he yelps, and the glasses go shattering around his feet with an ear-splitting _smash_. 

He stands there, stock-still amidst the wreckage, shoulders high around his ears like a spooked cat, and when he finally looks up it’s right into Keith’s dazzling, terror-stricken eyes.

Keith, made flesh. Right here. Real and breathtaking. Looking like every honey-warm fantasy and haunting nightmare wrapped up into one.

Keith, gone numb with shock, gives a murmured, “_Lance_,” and the soft, windless sound of it lands squarely in Lance’s chest, crater-sized and full-force, because for all the countless ways he’s heard Keith whisper his name, never before has it ever been such agony. It ignites a blaze of conflicting urges: of wanting to keep it there forever, of wanting to purge it from his veins like a toxin. Of wanting to reach for him, bones aching for it, and of wanting to recoil, for fear that a single touch may open the flood gates of something long sealed shut. Of something bruised and battered and _beautiful_. 

“You,” says Keith, heartbreakingly quiet. “You —”

Lance breathes it in, holds it in his lungs, a man starved. His body sings for it. He trembles, blood pounding in his ear like a war drum, with want and warnings all.

_Keith_, he’s dying to say, to let it spill from his lips until he remembers the taste of it. _Keith, Keith, Keith —_

But the moment is abruptly severed with the first _crunch_ of a fallen footstep over broken glass. A large hand comes down on Keith’s shoulder as Shiro approaches from behind. His gaze lowers to the floor, taking in the mess, then back up. He does not smile.

“Acxa,” he calls toward the bar, where one of the three bartenders — the dark-haired one — is snapping to attention. “Would you mind giving me a hand?” he asks, and the young woman steps out from behind the bar, probably in pursuit of cleaning supplies.

Then, to his brother, he goes, “Keith, there’s some paperwork in the office I need you to look over.”

“What,” mumbles Keith, like he’s only half-listening. His eyes, liquid and black, are still trained on Lance. 

“The office. Now, please. I’ll be right behind you.”

Shiro’s tone is kept well-mannered and composed, but still leaves no room for protest. Keith idles in place for longer than he should have the right to, until the steady press of Shiro’s hand is ushering him away and out of sight, with all the strong-armed insistence of a lion protecting its cub.

Lance, as if stirring from a trance, peeks up to find Shiro towering over him in all his hulking, god-like glory, and — yeah, okay, this guy’s just as terrifyingly _ripped_ as Lance remembers. He shrinks back on instinct, guilt and shame wreaking havoc in his gut.

“Um,” Lance mutters, voice shallow. “Hey. Sorry about the glasses. I can — I can pay you back, if you —”

Shiro steps forward, silencing him with a hand to his shoulder, and Lance almost gasps for how it feels like a weight bearing down. There isn’t a single line on this man’s face, Lance notices, that isn’t drawn as taut as a wire.

“Welcome back, Lance,” says Shiro, with a hint of something long-suffering in the way his mouth twitches.

And that’s all he leaves Lance with before he’s moving past him, before time resumes, before Lance finally — _finally_ — releases the breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding until now.

Welcome back, _indeed_.

* * *

When they get back to his place, Hunk — bless his beautiful soul — decides to whip up a giant batch of pasta carbonara. They eat it by the heaping bowlful, cross-legged on the kitchen floor, drinking the champagne from earlier out of plastic flutes left over from Hunk and Shay’s engagement party.

“He didn’t answer any of my calls, y’know. Like, after it happened. Is that some grade-A bullshit or what? Zero. Zilch. Not a one,” Lance is going on, just as he has been for the past hour. Bringing it up again tastes like copper in his mouth. The blood of an old scar. “He just walked out like it was nothing, and he… he just walked out.”

Hunk is watching him with those big, watery puppy-dog eyes of his. It’s terrible. Lance pointedly avoids his gaze, and then gets so caught up in his own sulking that he accidentally drinks the remainder of the champagne bottle by himself.

Later, when Lance is doubled over and dry-heaving within an inch of his life, he catches the sound of Hunk’s hushed tone as he most likely explains to his fiancée why there’s a sad, blubbering boy slumped over their toilet bowl. The bathroom door is sealed shut between them, distorting the syllables of his words, but Lance is sure it sounds something like: _ran into Keith tonight… not in a very good place right now…_

Which, honestly, only makes his urge to gag even greater.

Then the door clicks open, and Hunk’s head pokes inside, saying, “Shay’s gonna make up the couch for you, ‘kay, buddy?”

“M’sorry,” mumbles Lance.

“Don’t worry about it,” Hunk assures him. “Happens to the best of us.”

Lance manages about half of a weary grin before he’s launching his face into the bowl again.

“Oh, boy.” Hunk shudders at the sight, holding his breath to suppress the reflex of his own sympathy gag. He takes a seat on the edge of the bathtub, nudges Lance’s side with a bottle of water. “Time to hydrate.” 

Now emptied, Lance resurfaces. There’s sweat on his brow, and spit drying at the corner of his mouth, but he accepts Hunk’s offering with a resigned sigh. The water bottle stays cradled in his lap as he leans back against the toilet, fingers curling around it, trying to keep the world from spinning out completely.

“It was real, wasn’t it?” he asks at once. His voice is a quiet, raspy thing, scraping up the sides of his burning throat like gravel. “Me and him, we — tell me I’m not just making it all up. We loved each other real good, right? Didn’t we?” 

“You gotta make sure you drink, Lance.”

He glares, eyes half-lidded and miserable. “I thought I was better. I —” A breath. Slow and weighted in his lungs. “—I’m supposed to be getting _better_.”

“Tomorrow’ll be better,” Hunk promises. “You’ll see.”

* * *

Tomorrow is anything _but_ better.

Tomorrow, to put it crudely, is a verifiable shit-storm, and it begins with Lance being bludgeoned awake by what feels like a sledgehammer chipping away at his skull. Close behind is the all-too-recognizable sting of regret in the back of his throat, where not even a strangled gulp of his own sour-tasting saliva goes down smooth. It’s been a while, he thinks, since he’s done this. Since he’s given in, and just let himself _ache_. Maybe it’ll keep this time. Maybe if he lays here long enough, a sad sack of bones tarnishing the sophistication of Hunk and Shay’s fancy new couch, he’ll get beaten to a pulp by the throbbing pain of his poor decisions, and, eventually, forget all about — 

From somewhere in the room, Lance’s phone starts crying for attention. 

Half-volume, at most, but still. It manages to sound like someone shoved a goddamn foghorn inside his ear canal. Groaning, his hand flops over the edge of the couch, scrabbling around for the ringing device. He finally finds it face-down on the hardwood with a sizable crack zig-zagging across the protective glass. _Perfect_.

Without thinking, he answers the call. “What.”

His sister’s laughter crackles through the speakers. “Wow,” she says. “First day on the job, and you’re already _that_ stressed out?”

“I’m not —” Lance stops dead, panic spiking through him in one piercing jolt. “—_fuck_.” 

Rachel humors him with an unconvinced hum, which means absolutely nothing to Lance while he fights to disentangle himself from the blanket, already staggering into the bathroom by the time he hears her say, “Right, sure you’re not.”

A hideous, frazzled, washed-out zombie version of Lance stares back at him in the mirror. His clothes from yesterday are wrinkled beyond repair, and, after investigating with a quick sniff, just as rank as he suspected they’d be. And his _hair_ is — nope. He’s not even gonna go there. It’s too disastrous to even consider damage control. Lance switches to speaker mode, and splashes a few frenzied handfuls of water on his face. 

“Seriously, though, mom and I want to come by and see the shop today,” Rachel is going on. “Maybe grab a quick bite to eat while we’re there.”

Lance makes a gurgling noise — very disgruntled, perhaps pained — into the phone because, dear sweet _god_, just the vague mention of food has his stomach convulsing with horrific aftershocks. “_No_,” he hisses at his tossing gut, bent over at the waist, “do _not_ —”

“No? Is today a bad time?”

“No, no!” Lance half-yells, gritting his teeth until the urge to heave subsides, and then stumbles back into the living room. “I mean, no… problem. No problem.” He spots his work apron over by the front door, neatly folded, right next to his shoes. “Just come over — whenever.”

Rachel’s confusion is deafening in the silence. “…Okay?” she mutters, after a while.

By now, Lance has made it outside, squinting into the sunlight and power-walking the entire four blocks to the nearest subway station. “Uh, well, actually — make that ten minutes. Or how ‘bout twenty? Yeah, twenty’s good,” he says, straining to keep his breath even, though he has a sinking suspicion that Rachel can hear him huffing, anyway. “Like, gimme a sec to, uh —”

He’s about halfway down the station steps when a passing train comes whooshing down the tracks, roaring like a beast.

“Wait,” says Rachel, catching on. “Are you on the _subway_ right now —”

“Can’t hear you, okay, love you, bye!” Lance shouts, and then immediately hangs up.

He narrowly avoids elbowing a poor, unsuspecting busker in his haste to board the very next north-bound train he sees. People ghost through the aisles, and they’re all faceless to him, passing by like wind off the sides of the passenger car, insignificant, never-ending. Lance loves and hates the gentle turbulence of the ride because, on one hand, there’s something about the rails’ comforting bump and rattle that somehow puts his thrashing stomach at ease. But then there’s the other hand: his thoughts, how the train jostles them around like this but _violent_, sending them swerving down all the wrong lanes, stirring all sorts of unwanted things up to the surface. Things that aren’t supposed to matter anymore.

Things like —

The train screeches to such a harrowing halt that Lance, struggling to balance on his weak, wobbly knees, face-plants spectacularly on the floor. 

So, arriving disheveled, sweaty, and grumpy, Lance storms into the café. Fortunately, there’s nobody around to be frightened off by his blustery entrance except for Hunk, who does appear to be stifling a wince behind the two hefty bags of all-purpose flour in his grasp.

“Gee, thanks for the wake-up call, _amigo_,” grumbles Lance, shouldering Hunk aside on his way behind the counter. The flour almost slips to the floor.

“I, uh,” says Hunk, readjusting his grip, “thought you might want a couple extra hours of sleep.”

“Yeah, well, you thought wrong.” Still scowling, Lance battles with the strings of his apron until it hangs askew on his body, punctuating his completion of the task with a very halfhearted _ta-da_ gesture. “So. What’s the sitch? What’d I miss?”

“Well, I wiped down the tables, mopped the floors, restocked the fridge, and I was just about to get started on a fresh batch of vanilla tarts.”

“No customers yet?”

“We’ve only been open for ten minutes, Lance.”

“Oh,” he grunts, eyes blinking. “Right. Cool. Uh, then I guess I’ll go take care of the —”

“Hey, hang on a sec —”

Lance doesn’t make it very far before Hunk is reeling him back. He glances down at where Hunk’s fingers have trapped his wrist, then up again, brow beginning to furrow. 

Hunk lowers his voice to a whisper — which is ridiculous, seeing as they’re _alone_ — and asks, very gravely, “You sure you’re up for today?” 

Now Lance definitely looks irritated. And _mystified_, like Hunk has just spoken in tongues. “It’s our grand freakin’ opening,” he says, each word enunciated sharply. “Of _course_ I’m up for it.”

“Okay, but it’s just… last night?” Hunk ventures cautiously. “You seemed pretty, y’know —” Here, his whisper becomes even softer. “—_sad_.” 

Embarrassment sweeps up the back of Lance’s neck, eyes startling with something like stung pride, or a strange sense of betrayal towards Hunk for bringing it up when Lance much prefers to keep last night’s memories under the heel of his shoe where they belong, buried and forgotten about. So, bristling, he snaps out, “‘Cause I was drunk out of my ever-loving mind, dude,” and even as Hunk flinches at the ferocity in his tone, Lance doesn’t let up. “_Everyone’s_ sad when they’re drunk.”

“Listen, I’m only saying this ‘cause I’m a little worried, is all.”

“Then why don’t you just stick to minding your own business for once!”

The sound of the door swinging open, the hanging bell tinkling joyfully, is what interrupts them.

Immediately followed by his mother hollering so loud it travels the whole length of the room: “Lance! Sweetheart!”

Lance manages to sneak out a few colorful expletives under his breath, before calling back, “Hey, Mama.” He jerks himself free from Hunk’s iron grip, sensing something vaguely wounded in the look his friend gives him as he swivels away. “Hey, Rach.”

Then, carried by a plume of crisp morning breeze and Chanel No.5, Lance’s mother comes waltzing through the café in a smartly tailored pant suit with pinstripes. “Well, isn’t this old place a sight for sore eyes. The pictures you sent don’t do it any justice,” she says brightly, her heels a ruthless _click-clack_ against the newly redone floor. “Lance, honey, you look positively god-awful.”

She wrenches him down into a hug, and Lance mumbles into her lapel, “Nice to see you, too, Mama.”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. M,” says Hunk, as he receives a vigorous hug of his own, “I’ll take good care of him, promise,” which is met with a round of affectionate, motherly coos.

Rachel marches over next, coming out of nowhere, grin smug and tight-lipped. Forgoing an embrace, she simply squishes Lance’s face between her palms instead, and peers deep into his bloodshot eyes. “I can_not_ believe you’re drunk right now,” she tells him, keeping her volume low. 

“Hungover, actually, but so kind of you to notice,” Lance deadpans. It earns him a tiny smack to both cheeks, more sympathetic than mean. “Want anything?”

“Ooh, nonfat latte, please.”

“Mama, coffee?”

“Make it a decaf, sweetheart, with just a _splash_ of cream.” She pivots back to Hunk, leaning in to say, “I’m trying to cut back, you know, for the stress. One cup a day, that’s what they recommend, and any more than that is —” Her phone begins beeping inside her handbag, and the noise transforms her, overly-doting mother to steel-faced executive in one second flat. She abruptly excuses herself to the other end of the café as she answers the call, probably to verbally obliterate some poor, well-meaning office assistant who failed to meet a deadline in time.

Lance gets started on the drinks, warming up the espresso machine, and adjusting the brew head in place with practiced ease. Rachel, leaning up against the counter, watches fondly. 

“Aw, look at you,” she says. “Back in your natural habitat.”

“Yeah, could hardly even recognize myself without the coffee stains and steam burns.”

She laughs, a light, wistful tune.

“Sure brings back memories, huh?” she comments.

Lance responds with a noncommittal grunt, keeping his head down as the espresso machine moans, and sends billows of sweet-smelling steam curling up to the ceiling. 

* * *

**then.**

“If you’re not even gonna _pretend_ to be wiping those countertops, then you might as well go talk to him already.”

The groan of the espresso machine whirring to life is what finally manages to shake Lance out of his reverie. His eyes blink through the rose-colored haze, and then wander down to the rag dangling limp and useless in his hand as it drips liquid sanitizer all over his tattered converse sneakers. _Him_, Rachel had said, in a furtive, eyebrow-waggling sort of manner that leads Lance to believe she can only be referring to the delicious morsel of eye-candy at table three, who had shuffled into the café no more than ten minutes ago, and already has Lance shirking his clean-up duties in favor of ogling — and blatantly, at that, if someone as notoriously daffy as his sister is able to pick up on it.

“I’m thinking about it,” Lance admits.

Rachel rolls her eyes to the ceiling. “Quit thinking and just _do it_ before he catches you drooling all over yourself.”

But there doesn’t appear to be any danger of that actually happening, Lance notes. The guy at table three has his undivided attention buried in a spiral-bound journal of some kind, shoulder and back muscles gently flexing beneath his red-checkered flannel as he curls himself over the pages. Thick, choppy bangs fall loose around his face, obscuring his profile like a veil of ink-black curtains, until he’s reaching up to absently tuck those strands behind his ear, allowing Lance a glimpse of sinfully long lashes fanning out against a chiseled cheekbone, and —

Oh, yeah. Lance definitely needs to put the moves on this hottie, like, _yesterday_. 

He spins around so abruptly that his sneakers squeak against the wet tile. “Mystery Man got a name?”

Rachel peeks at the sharpie’d scrawl on the cup she’s just finished topping off. “Keith,” she reads aloud.

“Order?”

“Regular cappuccino with soy milk, light foam.”

Lance pulls a wince, and mutters an unfortunate ‘_yikes_’ under his breath.

“Ooh, you know what you should do?” Rachel trills giddily. “You should write your number on his cup like they do in all the rom-coms. That would be _so_ adorable. Do that.”

“And risk having him toss it on his way out the door?” he blows a raspberry, short and dismissive. “Nuh-uh. Rookie mistake. This one calls for some good, old-fashioned _razzle-dazzle_, baby.” Then, with a theatrical flourish, Lance flings the rag over his shoulder, appraises his reflection in the espresso machine’s chromed exterior, and snatches the cup right out of Rachel’s grasp.

“I’m goin’ in,” he announces, standing tall with puffed-chest bravado. 

“Godspeed, cadet.”

He offers a firm salute in response before swinging his legs over the counter, and crossing the floor. His stride is leisurely, giving himself plenty of time to work his smile into pearly-white perfection, to run a hand through his hair and tousle it just so. Because Lance already knows how to play this game like a seasoned champ. He practically wrote the goddamn rulebook. He knows exactly how to sweet-talk even the stuffiest of Upper East Side businessmen into buying an extra shot in their morning Americano. Knows exactly how to make flocks of NYU girls swoon with the power of a well-timed wink. _He’s got this, he’s got this, he’s got —_

“I’ve got a regular soy cappuccino with light foam for Keith,” says Lance, at his grandest and most affable as he sets the cardboard cup on table three’s polished surface.

“Yeah,” comes the guy’s mumbled reply. He spares not even the slightest of cursory glances, and then returns to scribbling away in his notebook, unaffected. “Thanks.” 

Lance loiters by the table, looking expectant. 

More silence. More scribbling.

_Time to crank up the charm_, Lance thinks, determination thrilling in his veins. Apparently this guy has a natural aversion to the concept of basic social cues, but not even this plot twist is twisty enough to derail Lance’s efforts. Consider this challenge _accepted_. 

So, remarkably undeterred, he eases his winning grin into more of a lazily-tilted smirk. Sets his jaw. Clears his throat. Game face: _on_. “Y’know you could’ve just ordered a latte, right?” he chimes in coolly. 

It takes a delayed moment for the comment to fully land, but, eventually, Keith’s fingers stall, pen hovering idly over the page as if he’s just hit a particularly annoying snag in his train of thought. And when Keith finally looks up properly this time, Lance is struck across the face by a slap of perplexed, glittery-eyed beauty. Flecks of something so vibrantly celestial that it has his brain spitting sparks like a fuse gone completely haywire. His smirk flinches out of place. His heart skips a beat, trips over itself and lands with a perilous _ker-plunk_ against his ribs. This guy is just as gorgeous in detail as he’d been from afar. 

Oh, _fuck_ —

“What?” Keith deadpans, and the stark sound of it swings Lance back to reality.

“I mean,” he recovers quickly, swallowing through it, rocking back on his heels, “not trying to be a snob or anything, but I _am_ the guy who makes the coffee around here, so I feel like it’s partly my responsibility to let you in on a little-known secret of the trade. Cappuccinos and lattes? Basically the same thing. Big difference is the foam, which you, apparently, don’t even like, but. Still. I get where you’re coming from, y’know? Cappuccino _sounds_ classier, more mature. Lattes are kinda like the unofficial basic bitch drink of the twenty-first century, thanks to Starbucks and all their artificial diabetes-in-a-cup nonsense. And you don’t exactly strike me as a _basic_ kinda guy, with the whole 80’s thrift store vibe you got going on — and don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan, but it does make me think you’ve got a little something special going on behind that pretty face of yours. Y’know. In a _good_ way.” 

Keith blinks those exquisite eyes at him, in an exaggerated slowness. “So is this just… a normal thing you do with all your customers?” he drawls.

“It’s a slow night,” Lance shrugs. “Gotta keep entertained somehow.”

“And psychoanalyzing a random person’s coffee order does the trick?”

A soft laugh huffs past Lance’s lips. “Well, between you and me,” he says, low and deliberate, “it _might_ just be an excuse to get to know you.” 

The weight of Keith’s scrutiny is enormously crushing as it roves over him from head to toe, so much so that Lance feels like he may buckle under its long, heavy drag. “You don’t know the first thing about me,” Keith points out bluntly. 

“Then let’s change that.” Keith’s brow leaps up with intrigue. Emboldened, Lance goes on, “My shift’s over soon, and there’s supposed to be some live music here tonight. Maybe you’d wanna stick around and check it out with me?” 

For a split, mortifying second, he thinks Keith is going to bust out laughing at him, the way his brow keeps inching higher and higher, followed by a funny little tremor of his mouth. Just the mere possibility of that wipes the smile clean off Lance’s expression, has his stomach roiling with dread, has him clumsily backtracking over his words.

“Or not! Or — maybe music’s not your thing? That’s cool, too. That’s — _yeah_. It’s probably gonna be super lame, anyway. A total snooze-fest. Uh, how about we —”

A boisterous voice rings through the café, and both of them turn to look. 

“Aha!” chirps Lance’s abuela, her grin infectiously warm and bright as she approaches the pair. “Now _this_ strapping young man must be Keith.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says. It’s the first time Lance sees him smile — _really_ smile, more pronounced, more obvious where his lips are pushing a pair of dimples into his cheeks — and he finds it, quite frankly, disgustingly attractive. Keith, oblivious to the crisis that Lance now seems to be enduring on the sidelines, extends a hand toward the woman. “And you must be Estela. Thanks for having me.”

Positively bubbling with delight, she clasps his hand between both of hers, and gives it a zealous shake. “Ay, dios mío, _and_ he has manners. Can you believe it?” she gushes. “I hope my grandson isn’t over here giving you a hard time.” 

“He’s trying to,” Keith replies, almost instantaneously, casting Lance another up-and-down sweep of his gaze, which — much to Lance’s sudden embarrassment — Estela notices.

“Well, I hate to interrupt, but I’m going to need him back behind the counter,” and her eyes narrow admonishingly when they take a sharp swerve to her grandson. “To finish all the cleaning that should’ve been done _hours_ ago.”

Lance splutters inelegantly, “But my shift’s almost over! Make Rachel do it!”

“This boy will not be any less handsome or any less _available_ by the time you finish all your work, niño.”

“Wha — Lita!”

“Vamos, vamos.” She thrusts that godforsaken rag into Lance’s hands, despite his stammering protests. Pivoting back to Keith, tone immediately softening, she tells him, “Keith, cariño, you go ahead and start setting up whenever you’re ready,” and then heads for the kitchen.

_Setting up?_ Lance wants to babble out, and almost does, until he composes himself long enough to spot Keith standing and reaching for a black guitar case by his feet. It’s covered in stickers, and various band logos, and has definitely been sitting _right fucking there_ this entire time. Lance’s mouth goes slack with dumb surprise. Maybe he would’ve noticed it sooner if he hadn’t been so hopelessly hung up on this guy’s stupidly proportionate face. Or his _lips_. Or the stardust sprinkled in his gaze. Or —

When Lance looks up again, he finds that Keith’s eyes still haven’t left him, and so he snaps his gaping mouth shut at once.

“Wait for me after the show,” Keith tells him. It’s not a question. It’s confident and outrageously _sexy_. “I mean, as long as you think you can handle it. Might be too lame for you.”

“_Hah_,” Lance barks out miserably. “Ha-ha, that’s… _wow_. Okay.” A chagrinned sigh. “I fucked up, huh?” 

“A little bit, yeah,” Keith says, amused.

“But, um — I’d love to hang out after. If the offer still stands?”

“It does,” says Keith. “See you later, then —” He pauses, brow scrunching. “—Rachel?”

Lance promptly startles, looking down at his chest where an embossed name tag is pinned quite crookedly to his syrup-stained apron. “Oh,” he blurts. “Right. Yeah, no, that’s — it’s my sister’s. We’re twins, so it’s just, like, this really dumb joke we do sometimes. Swapping names.”

Keith nods slowly. “So yours is…?” 

“She’s wearing it. Probably. Unless she lost it already, which actually wouldn’t surprise —”

“I’m asking for your name.”

“_Oh_,” Lance blurts again, practically shouts it across the whole goddamn room. His restless fingers wring into the sanitizing rag, and his cheeks throb with excruciating heat when he realizes that Keith’s lips are beginning to flutter at the corners. “It’s Lance. I’m Lance. My name’s Lance.”

_Say it one more time, you absolute friggin’ moron_, he chides himself harshly.

But Keith is just grinning at him, a subtle gleam of canine, and repeats, “Lance,” like it’s precious and poetic, like he’s savoring the taste of it on his tongue, and can’t bear to let it go.

And, in hindsight, Lance honestly doesn’t know how he survives it.

Just like he doesn’t know how he survives an entire hour of Keith making eyes at him from the corner of the room, where he’s perched on a wooden stool, lips brushing the mic. Doesn’t know how he keeps from crumbling to ash when he hears that gorgeously heart-wrenching rendition of _Annie’s Song_, or when that raw, husky baritone hits his ears like an oncoming freight train. And he really, truly, sincerely doesn’t know what kind of gracious cosmic deity he needs to sign his entire life over to now that he finds himself here, sometime later, in the murky, half-lit alleyway behind the café.

Keith kisses the same way he plays music — passionately, shamelessly, _intensely_ — like it’s flowing out of him with every resounding chord and caressing thumb. And Lance is swept up in the harmony of it all, clinging to Keith and letting himself be kissed in all the deep, soul-shaking ways that Keith wants to kiss him. His apron lays in a forgotten heap on the ground, abandoned along with Lance’s inhibitions the very moment Keith decided to crowd him against the brick, and make a thoroughly beautiful mess of him, because how could Lance not lose track of himself in the middle of _this_ — this, so much, _everything_ — the dizzying pressure, the slide of their mouths, the taste of Keith’s ridiculous coffee order on his supple lips.

When Keith drags Lance’s bottom lip between his teeth, Lance whines into it, feeling desperate and greedy. He wants more. He wants _more_. And he wants it so bad that he forgets why he shouldn’t. Right now, the only thing taking up space in his head is the thundering of his own heart. The wild adrenaline jumping high and dangerous in his chest.

Keith pulls back after a while, and tips their foreheads together. His breath is coming quick and staccato against Lance’s skin, warming the already humid air around them, while his fingers are still furiously gripping the collar of Lance’s shirt. Here, in the darkness, he looks otherworldly as he looms over Lance like a shadow.

“Hey, look, I don’t know if —” Keith gasps into the silence, eyes black as oil slicks and shining with something almost vulnerable. Lance moves the hair away from Keith’s face to see them better. “—My place isn’t too far.”

Despite the cryptic, unreadable line that Keith forces his mouth into, Lance knows what he means. He knows an invitation when he hears one, and he knows a bad idea when he hears one, too. This kind of sounds like both. He knows it. He does. He knows —

“I’m in,” Lance says, and his brain promptly explodes.

His place, as it turns out, really isn’t too far. A cozy one-bedroom east of Midtown on 62nd, right above a small Italian deli and a nail salon. Keith doesn’t bother fumbling for a light switch when they plow their way inside. He just shuts his door one-handed, following the milky path of moonlight painted across the floorboards as it shines in from the north-facing window, and Lance toddles along blindly, attached at the mouth. There’s a beige futon in the center of the room, opposite a television set on what appears to be an upended crate. Dozens upon dozens of cardboard boxes filled with vinyl records are stacked against the wall. A cherry red Gibson Firebird on display in the corner. A half-full bookshelf. Lance takes it all in, peripherally, in the span of about ten seconds, before Keith herds him to the bedroom and shoves him onto the bed.

“Hey, uh, before we get into this — just to be totally transparent here,” Lance somehow manages to garble while Keith is otherwise preoccupied with straddling his lap, hips rocking slow, “I’m not really looking for anything serious right now.” 

Keith gives him a look like he thinks Lance might be a raging idiot, but continues yanking his shirt over his head, anyway.

“Not — not that I’m not a serious guy or anything,” Lance keeps rambling, fast and flustered. “I mean, me and monogamy are usually a guaranteed two-for-one deal, but I’m —” Keith pushes him flat against the mattress, sucks hard on the underside of his jaw. “—leaving at the end of the summer for grad school, y’know? So the next few months are basically just borrowed time for me, which is, like — _ahh_… not the strongest foundation for kicking off a new relationship or whatever, and —”

With a wet pop, Keith withdraws his mouth. It’s all spit-shiny and plump as he stares down at Lance, a palm pressed to the center of his chest, keeping him pinned. “Do you always talk this much in bed?” 

“I talk this much everywhere, dude.”

“Mm.” A flirty little half-smile suddenly blooms on Keith’s swollen lips. “Cute.” 

“Feel free to shut me up whenever you want, though,” says Lance, taking Keith by the waist. “Extreme measures are most definitely encouraged.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a couple ideas,” Keith assures him, and then swoops down to swallow the sweet melody of Lance’s laughter.

* * *

Lance wakes up bright and early the following morning to thin beams of sunlight spilling over the sheets like watercolor, and a warm, solid weight breathing against his back. He stretches out along the mattress, long and luxurious, with a tiny hum, only to discover that his entire body aches in that satisfyingly tender, best-sex-of-his-life sort of way.

And then he remembers.

And then he thinks: _god-fucking-dammit. _

Because, _oh_, last night _happened_. Last night happened — two? three times? — and there’s not an inch of him that isn’t still tingling from the sense-memory of it; all the delicate places where Keith left marks, and sucked kisses, and traced reverent paths with his tongue, teeth, calloused fingertips, and — _god_, Lance can feel himself transcending to a whole new plane of existence just _thinking_ about it. About Keith. About how effortlessly Lance fell into his orbit, and fit against him like he belonged there, and nowhere else. 

It seems downright inexcusable, in Lance’s humble opinion, that a near-perfect stranger should be allowed to wreck him like this. To rock his world so astronomically that he sees it differently now, after Keith. Like, what’s _that_ about? Is he supposed to just ignore this seismic shift in his universe, put a muzzle on his feelings, and chalk it all up to some fatal flaw in the system? 

Thing is, Lance knows what he felt, and he knows, without doubt, there’s absolutely nothing _flawed_ about it. Keith’s touch had been real and electric, filling him, burning through flesh and bone. The two of them had moved together, breathed together, like they already knew each other’s rhythms by heart. A lit match to Lance’s kerosene. And when Lance had felt himself start to shiver out of his own skin, Keith had brought him back with a kiss to his mouth, a palm to his pink-stained cheek, whispering through the breathlessness: _you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, I’ve got you_. Lance had never been more connected, more insatiable, more utterly turned on. 

Which leads him to wonder — has fate _actually_ been cruel enough to bless him with the glorious gift of sexual nirvana the summer before he’s moving out of town, probably for good?

He reiterates, aloud this time: _“God-fucking-dammit.” _

Then, as if awakened by Lance’s whispered lament, the weight behind him gives a satisfied snuffle, nosing closer at the knobs of his spine. Lance sighs at the contact, feeling preposterously gooey inside as he reaches an arm back, and, _huh_. That’s odd. Keith is squirmier than he remembers. Also — furrier?

When Lance rolls over to investigate, he suddenly finds himself nose-to-snout with what has to be the most gargantuan Siberian husky he’s ever seen. Striking tufts of black and white fur, a pair of jewel-blue eyes, all curled up on Keith’s human bed like he owns the damn thing.

“Uh,” says Lance, sitting up, blinking and bewildered. “H-Hey there…”

Tilting its head, fluffy tail swishing to and fro, the dog gives an excited, “Arr-ooo!” and then licks a wet, fat stripe all the way up the side of Lance’s face. Lance yelps with unbridled laughter, hooking his fingers behind the animal’s pointy ears and scratching away with gusto.

“Aw yeah, you’re just a big ‘ol softie, aren’t you? Isn’t that right, gorgeous?”

The dog preens, and mewls, and practically tries to clamber its way into Lance’s lap like an eager puppy, despite its size. Its massive tongue is dangling out the side of its mouth, completely blissed out under Lance’s enthusiastic pampering, just as Keith’s exasperated voice calls out from the doorway, startling them both.

“Kosmo,” he orders with a sharp snap of his fingers, “off.”

With one final nuzzle to Lance’s chest, the dog — _Kosmo_, Lance figures — perks up, leaps off the bed, and scampers obediently out of the room, paws pitter-pattering on the floor. 

“Sorry about that,” Keith says, after a beat. “He gets really… snuggly.”

“Nah, it’s cool. I’m kinda into it.” Lance swipes a hand over his cheek, cleaning off the residual dog drool, and adds, “Even the slobbering, weirdly enough.” 

A fond smile hesitates around Keith’s lips. “You sleep okay?” he asks.

“Yeah, definitely. Like a rock.”

As they spend a quiet, timid moment studying each other from across the room, Lance realizes he’s never seen Keith in broad daylight before right now. And the sight is _stunning_, of course. It pours over him in pale slants, exposing all his soft edges and smoothing out the hard ones until he’s hazy and golden. His hair has been secured into a loose knot against the back of his neck, like he did it on an uncaring whim, and he’s dressed comfortably in grey sweatpants, a navy t-shirt that Lance will bet smells like fresh cotton. He looks so unbearably warm and homey and — _huggable_.

Keith is the first to glance away. He narrows a flustered little frown down at the ceramic mug cradled between his palms, and Lance is kind of glad to see he isn’t the only one feeling overwhelmed by this freaky, indisputable chemistry between them. 

“I, um. Don’t know what you usually like for breakfast,” Keith begins, “so I just made you some coffee.”

Lance openly gawks at Keith as he strides forward, light-footed, as to not disturb the contents of the mug, like he’s some kind of sensible gentleman with actual, thoughtful consideration for Lance’s morning habits. The _scoundrel_.

But then Lance is ducking his head to hide the blush painted across his face, trying to play it cool with a cheeky remark. “Making a homemade brew for the resident coffee connoisseur himself, huh? Bold move, my guy.”

He means it as a joke, of course, but when he chances another peek to gauge Keith’s reaction, he finds Keith sitting on the edge of the bed, brow knitted with utmost seriousness. “If you don’t like it, I can get you something —”

“_Keith_,” sputters Lance, along with an incredulous snicker. He takes the mug into his hands, holds it protectively to his chest. “Oh my god, man, I was _kidding_. You don’t have to — I’m not actually that much of an asshole, I swear. Your coffee is _really_ fine. Seriously.”

The look of pure relief on Keith’s face is priceless. The way it makes his shoulders sag, and his gaze go all soft and sincere. Lance wants to yank him back into this bed. Wants to yank him down, and climb on top of him, and shower him in the sweetest kisses, _immediately_.

And that’s when Keith says, all of a sudden, “Do you wanna go out with me sometime?”

A mouthful of searing hot coffee shoots directly down Lance’s windpipe on a startled inhale, and he attempts to soldier through it as gracefully as possible, knowing full well that Keith’s crazy-attentive eyes are still drinking him in like a tall glass of water, slowly and decadently. Which would be fine — probably even a little _hot_ — if Lance weren’t currently flaunting the world’s most egregious case of bedhead, and, y’know, trying not to choke to death.

“Huh?” Lance eventually croaks, feverish all the way to the tips of his ears.

“You, me.” The corner of Keith’s mouth wiggles knowingly. “Drinks, music.”

Lance chuffs out a breezy little laugh, praying that the upwards pitch of it isn’t too shrill or too noticeable. “Kinda sounds like a date or something,” he points out awkwardly.

“Because maybe it is a date,” says Keith. And then, while flashing a devastating smirk, “Or something.”

“Keith —” Lance mutters, expression folding with genuine regret. There’s an ugly, bitter lump throbbing at the base of his throat that hurts like hell, and it takes him more than a couple tries before he’s able to swallow around it. “—Look. It’s not… that I don’t want to. ‘Cause, trust me, I really, _really_ want to. But it’s just — I’m leaving at the end of the —” 

“I know,” Keith is quick to interrupt. “But I’m not talking about the end of the summer right now, Lance. I’m talking about tomorrow night. One night. Come out with me.”

He’s looking at Lance the way someone might throw their eyes into the bright, unending horizon. Brimming with promise. A lit cinder of hope in his bottomless gaze.

Well. It’s not like Lance ever really stood much of a chance, anyway.

* * *

Getting through his shift the next day is pure, unadulterated, self-inflicted torture. It’s made worse by the fact that the café happens to be especially busy that afternoon, forcing Lance to concentrate on a variety of things that aren’t exclusively Keith-centric. And it’s made even worse than _that_ by Lance being foolish enough to spill the beans to Rachel about his plans for the evening. He all but shouts it in her face, really; unprompted, palms splayed on the countertop, looking all of fifteen years old and _giddy_. And, naturally, Rachel then takes it upon herself to be doubly insufferable whenever she catches him glancing longingly at the clock, or grinning off into space, deep in the throes of a particularly swoon-worthy daydream — which is more often than he cares to admit.

So, yeah, maybe he has a _tiny_ bit of a crush.

A tiny, all-consuming, catastrophic, textbook-definition crush. 

Lance should’ve seen this coming a mile away. Should’ve recognized the blinking red signs, that telltale whiff of trouble from the very moment Keith had him against the wall, or in his _bed_, for god’s sake. Because Lance just isn’t built for that casual hit-it-and-quit-it routine, no matter how much he winks and flirts and talks big talk. Never has been. He’s into hand-holding, and sleepy cuddles, and stay-in movie nights, and bringing home flowers just because. And upon analyzing the evidence — Keith’s gentle touches, his unexpected affinity for mid-coital eye contact, him being due to pick Lance up in a matter of minutes for their very first, official, no-sex-required date — it seems like Keith might be into all those things, too.

In layman’s terms: Lance is _so _doomed_._

Where had Keith been hiding himself four years ago, when Lance was a bright-eyed, big-hearted NYU freshman, mangling himself into knots over sweet smiles and pretty faces, who never seemed to stay interested for more than a night? When he was practically pining for long-term commitment, and not three short months away from starting a brand new life? Why couldn’t they’ve scheduled this fateful run-in back then? That would’ve been more convenient. Ideal, even. Not to mention all the internal conflict and suffering it would’ve spared him.

But Lance’s silly little heart just doesn’t get the memo, so when the clock strikes seven, and not a second past, he’s wrestling out of his apron, and rounding the counter with all the fluttering unrest of a caged bird.

“Well, ladies, it’s been a real blast,” he says, already making a hasty beeline for the front door, “but I got things to do, places to be, people to —”

He’s no more than ten paces away before his abuela slides into view, blocking his escape path, hands planted on her shapely hips. “What on earth could possibly be more important than giving your dear abuela a proper goodbye, hm?” she wonders, playfully accusing. 

“Lance has a _date_,” Rachel singsongs from behind the counter, letting a few extra teasing syllables slip into the last word, just to be particularly obnoxious. 

“A date!” Estela’s eyes come to life like flickering headlights. “With who?”

“Regular cappuccino with soy milk, light foam.”

“His name’s Keith!” Lance wails over his shoulder, sounding a bit riled, and probably looking it to match, which has his sister cackling. 

“Ah, the guitar player,” recalls Estela. “I saw the way he was looking at you, niño.” She leans in, almost conspiratorial, to straighten the buttons running down the front of his shirt. “That boy was _smitten_.”

“So’s Lance, apparently,” Rachel sniggers. 

“It’s just one lousy date, okay?” he huffs an indignant snort. “It’s not like we’re —” Together? An item? Meant to be? Lance doesn’t like any of the options his mind tries to mock him with. He pouts, feeling immaturely resentful, and swats his abuela’s fussing fingers away from his shirt. “—_y’know_. It’s whatever. We’re keeping things casual.”

Rachel eyeballs him dubiously. “Have you ever done _anything_ casual, like, honestly _ever_, in your entire life?”

Lance whirls around, fully prepared to snark, when his phone dings cheerily in his pocket. He scrambles for it, ignoring the knowing glances shared between his two family members and the sudden fizzing in his belly.

“It’s Keith,” he absolutely does not squeak. “I gotta go.”

“Can’t wait for the wedding!” Rachel calls after him, in lieu of a farewell. 

Estela catches him by the shoulder on his way out the door, and wheels him around to smack a noisy kiss against his cheek, thumbing away the deep scarlet lipstick smudge she left behind in the same motion. “Remember to have fun tonight, my sweet boy,” she tells him. 

Outside, the streets have been doused in all sorts of radiant hues from the setting sun’s glow, pinks and reds and golds clinging to the air like a fine mist. Keith, as his text dictated, is waiting right in front of the café, motorcycle parked curbside while he leans up against the nearby lamppost, hands stuffed into the pockets of his fitted jeans. Dark, dreamy, and painfully good-looking, no effort expended, as if he just tripped off the front page of _Rolling Stone_ magazine or something. He lights up when he sees Lance coming down the stoop, like Lance is the only thing worth looking at in the whole goddamn city.

“Oh my god.” Lance saunters forward, awed. The warmth in Keith’s dusk-colored gaze has him tethered, a fishhook to the ribs, toting him along helplessly. “C’mon, seriously? It’s like I’m in every Nicholas Sparks movie _ever_ right now. Quick — sweep me off my feet and say something romantic.”

Keith removes his hands and yanks Lance in the rest of the way, palms flat on the small of his back, breath hot on the shell of his ear. “Something romantic,” he purrs, so velvety and divine that Lance feels it tapering down the length of his spine like a full-bodied shiver.

“Aaaand… _swoon_,” he sighs dramatically, lashes fluttering for emphasis. “Heart eyes, heart eyes. Cue the adorable date montage.”

“You ever ridden one of these before?” Keith asks, and then swings a deliciously muscled leg over his shiny gunmetal motorcycle like it’s nothing.

“You talking about yourself or the bike?” Lance lifts a suggestive brow. “Because…”

A spare helmet smacks him right in the gut, but he manages to catch it with a startled ‘_oof_’ before it can hit the pavement.

“Easy, tiger,” smirks Keith. 

It’s upon finally mounting the bike, arms locked around Keith’s middle, that he feels it: how he bends to the shape of Keith’s spine, melts into him so seamlessly like his body has found a new home here, right against Keith’s back where their heartbeats can thrum in sync. Lance can’t even hope to explain the swell of emotion that overtakes him, or the strange rush of familiarity that settles in his bones, a tonic for his constant restlessness.

“Hang on tight,” warns Keith, pulling on the clutch with a trigger-happy grip. “I like to go fast.” 

As the bike rumbles beneath them, Lance presses his face into Keith’s sturdy shoulder blade, smelling soap and leather and something intoxicatingly _Keith_, and he says, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the engine, “Good to know.”

So, _so_ doomed. 

* * *

The bar that Keith takes them to is all the way in Greenwich Village, although Lance doesn’t mind the extra travel time if it means he gets to keep his arms around Keith like this. He likes the city lights blurring past them as they ride, and how Keith throws his head back, giving his face to the brisk summer breeze with abandon. He likes feeling the vibrations of a chuckle where his chest is flush to Keith’s back with every hairpin maneuver that sends them weaving through the sea of honking taxi cabs. He likes — _this_.

A strong waft of smoke and spilled liquor envelopes Lance like a cloud when they walk inside. The place is dingy and poorly lit, save for a few flickering candles on tabletops, and a lone spotlight aimed at a three-person band as they play some music in the far corner. A classic downtown dive bar, it would seem. Keith moves confidently through the room, blending in impeccably with the grittier, edgier clientele tucked away in the shadows, whereas Lance feels a bit misplaced in his work shirt and simple jeans.

“Keith! Hey!” a voice calls out from afar, and Lance doesn’t miss the adorable way Keith perks up at the sound of it. A smile parts his lips, and twinkles behind his eyes.

Then a man comes loping through the crowd, arms outstretched. Upon first glance, he’s terribly intimidating — with his broad shoulders, and rock-hard chest, and considerable height, for starters — but the grin on his face is undeniably pleasant and pristine, the kind meant for photographs.

“Well, look who decided to drag himself down to _this_ neck of the woods for a change,” the man says. Keith laughs, and then the two of them share a hearty embrace. Those impressive biceps could very well snap Keith in half like a twig, Lance thinks, and Keith is no frail flower himself. 

“Shiro, this is Lance,” Keith says once they part. “Lance, this is my brother, Shiro. He owns the bar.”

Shiro’s picture-perfect smile turns to Lance. “Real nice to meet you.”

“You, too,” Lance beams. They shake. God, even this guy’s _hands_ are all muscle. “Sweet place you got here, man.”

At that, Keith snorts violently into his palm. Shiro’s face freezes, but his lips, on the other hand, look like they want to rupture at the seams with a grimace, and are just barely containing themselves. “Did Keith tell you to say that?” he asks carefully.

“Uh —” sputters Lance, desperately glancing between the two brothers. “—no?” 

Keith, still snickering under his breath, says, “Shiro thinks this place is a dump,” by way of explanation.

“Not my terminology,” says Shiro, reprimanding Keith with a sidelong glance. Then, politely, back to Lance, “It could stand some improvements. But I’m sure you two didn’t come all the way down here to listen to me complain. Come on over to the bar, and we’ll get you some drinks.”

For a seedy hole-in-the-wall joint, they sure are well-stocked, Lance observes, eyes grazing the shelves of alcohol that extend all the way to the ceiling. No sooner do they take their seats than two brimming pints of craft beer are placed in front of them, delivered by a stunning young woman with silver-toned hair. _Thanks, Allura,_ is what Shiro whispers to her before she’s gliding away in her high-heeled boots to tend to the other customers.

An enthusiastic round of applause breaks out, prompting Lance to swivel in his stool toward the sound of fading music. Off in the distance, he sees the band beginning to pack up their equipment for the night, and, right next to him, he sees Keith looking on with rapt fixation. With something almost sullen, and hard to decipher under the dim lights. 

Lance nudges him, light and inoffensive. “How come you’re not over there blowing the roof off this joint tonight, rockstar?” he wonders, and Keith flinches back to the present. 

“Keith’s more than welcome to play here whenever he wants,” says Shiro. His brow flattens sternly, which is strikingly at odds with the otherwise wholesome tone of his voice. “He knows that.”

It’s a warning, the dark look that Keith very clearly directs at his brother. It hangs between them for a beat too long, unrelenting, like crossfire in some private, invisible war zone. “This place is for real musicians,” Keith eventually protests.

“Okay.” Lance blinks. “So?”

“So all my original material is shit.”

Shiro suddenly heaves a sigh, weary and weighted, as if he’s heard this all before, maybe even hundreds of times — and his exasperated frown, how he skulks off to the other end of the bar, confirms it. Lance watches him go, and then turns back to Keith, saying, “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess you’re probably the only one who believes that.” 

Keith shrugs it off stiffly, wrapping a hand around his cold glass, but making no effort to lift it. “There’s nothing else _to_ believe when I haven’t written anything halfway decent in years.”

Try as he may, Lance can’t seem to stop his nose from scrunching unattractively at that little nugget of information. It’s — baffling, to say the least. Because he still remembers Keith’s performance the other night, in greater detail than he probably should, and every soulful note and masterful pluck of guitar strings had been… _transformative_. Not a single gaze in the whole café could stray from Keith, sitting there, hunching over his guitar, living, breathing, and bleeding the music as it stripped him down to something so bewitchingly intimate, and Lance —

He laughs, dumbfounded.

Which is embarrassing, really, because he doesn’t even mean to. And he doesn’t even realize it until Keith starts glaring daggers in his direction, looking a bit miffed. 

“Sorry, I’m —” Lance pauses for so long he forgets his words. His head shakes, reconfiguring. “—Like, okay, I know my opinion on music stuff doesn’t exactly amount to much, but — that? _That’s_ your definition of being a _real_ musician? Whether or not you’re the friggin’… Shakespeare of songwriting?”

Keith doesn’t reply, just holds himself very still.

“I heard you play the other night, and it was — I mean, I really _felt_ you play, dude. I could feel how much you love it. It was, like, basically _oozing_ out of you.”

“Ew,” Keith mutters dryly.

But Lance keeps going. “You’re a musician, Keith. It’s what you’re meant to do, it’s your _thing_. And it’s... I dunno, it’s just so cool that you actually have a _thing_.” 

When Keith still doesn’t budge, eyes blank like he’s out of commission, Lance gets the awful notion that maybe he’s overstepped. Gone and said too much like the perpetual loudmouth he is, and now Keith is finally sick of it, and —

“So what’s your thing, then?” he hears Keith ask, a subtle segue.

The laugh that it startles out of Lance is worse than before. It’s always worse when he’s faking it, when it’s so brittle and wry that it barely makes it past his lips at all. He takes his glass, and taps it against Keith’s with a commiserating little clink. 

“I’ll keep you posted.”

* * *

It doesn’t take Lance very long to decide that he likes spending time with Keith. He likes that he’s actually a lot more engaging than his aloof, surface-level appearance might lead someone to believe, once he allows himself to open up. He likes that Keith is a surprisingly intent listener, and lets Lance rattle off tangents about his family, and his friends, and all his ridiculous theories about the haunted subway station on the corner of 6th and 42nd. He likes the cute, wheezy sound of Keith’s laugh when he cracks an unrehearsed joke that he’s ninety-percent sure didn’t land well, but Keith seems to find it amusing, anyway. He likes Keith’s lopsided smiles, and his smoldering eyes, and their quick-paced banter, and the way their legs keep brushing under the countertop when they lean in to hear each other better. He likes — _this_.

He likes _Keith_.

And to such an absurd degree that, even after they finish their drinks and trudge outside into the warm summer air, he doesn’t want the night to end. “So what’s next?” he finds himself itching to ask, hopeful, tangling their fingers together as they stroll down the block to where Keith’s bike is parked.

“Maybe you can tell me,” says Keith, with one of those grins that’s been making Lance’s stomach swoop all night long. “I just showed you one of my favorite spots in the city. Now I wanna see one of yours.”

Which is how they end up at Bethesda Fountain, sitting side by side on the basin’s ledge, overlooking the water as it shimmers under the glow of street lamps like it’s made of magic.

“Lita — uh, my abuela — she used to take me and my siblings here all the time when we were little,” Lance explains, letting the toe of his sneaker idly skim the calm surface. “It was our tradition, I guess, to toss a penny in, and make a wish. And that angel up there?” He points toward the bronze sculpture perched from above, and says, “She told us it was put there to bless the water, so that all our wishes would stay safe forever. Pretty cheesy stuff, I know, but —”

Before he can finish, Keith is already holding out his palm, offering two copper coins. “Can’t disrespect tradition,” he says in response to Lance’s astonished stare.

_Plink-plink_, go the pennies as they break the water’s surface, one by one, sinking to the bottom with the rest of Lance’s childhood wishes. In the moments that follow, everything stands perfectly still, like the entire universe is holding its breath, waiting for the mystical powers-that-be to work their supposed wonder.

Then, while turning to Keith, Lance speaks into the stretching silence, “So, you think it’ll come true?”

Keith is looking at him — his mouth, more specifically, like he’d been planning on answering, but then gets hopelessly sidetracked by Lance’s lips, impossibly pink and inches from his own.

“I’m about to find out,” whispers Keith, and Lance’s heart double-beats, rapid with realization, as Keith gradually leans into his space. Head tilting. Neck extending.

“Keith,” Lance gasps, effectively blocking the kiss at the last second. He shifts his face away, so that Keith’s nose bumps into his flushed cheek. “I… I’m not gonna let you kiss me.”

“No?” Keith breathes, satin-smooth, the heat of it burning Lance’s skin like a candle’s flickering flame. “Why’s that?”

Lance snaps his eyes shut at once. “‘Cause if you kiss me right now,” he gets out, voice cracking in the middle, “I don’t think I’m ever gonna want you to stop.”

There they stay for an undeterminable amount of time, with the inevitable weight of _that_ hanging over them, aching and bittersweet, as though they’re two star-crossed lovers unwilling to accept their fate. The cruelty and unfairness of it; of having met too late, and fallen too soon. It claws at Lance’s rib cage, makes him question how much more of this he can take, how much longer he can keep up this air of faulty resolve, except Keith allows him little time to wonder before he’s slowly retreating. 

When Lance’s lids flitter open again, tentatively, he finds himself paralyzed by the sight in front of him. Keith’s eyes, darker, fiercer, more leonine than they’ve ever been before, like he wants to drown Lance. Like he wants to wreck him to ruin, then make him whole again. Lance is certain he’s never been watched so severely in his life. 

Then a hand is pressed to Lance’s jaw, cups the jutting shape of it so tenderly, as if it were made of porcelain. Keith’s thumb follows suit, grazing the shape of Lance’s lips, lingering on a smear of silver lamplight caught around his cupid’s bow, and there’s something longing behind that simple touch. Something hesitant, and carefully leashed. Something that sends Lance’s pulse into a rabid frenzy. 

“Yeah,” says Keith, rough and resigned. He places a chaste kiss to Lance’s forehead, murmuring against his brow, “Me, too.”

In a flash, he’s pulling away again, and Lance hears himself whimper pathetically at the loss, clipped off behind the clamp of his teeth. Keith gives him a soft-eyed smile, almost apologetic in the way it sits crooked on his face, and —

It breaks something in Lance, seeing Keith look at him like that. It comes crashing down, fills him with light, and _it breaks him_.

“Fucking hell,” he growls, like a dam bursting, and then drags Keith into a full, open-mouthed kiss.

* * *

**now.**

It’s some bizarre, twisted joke of the universe, Lance is now starting to realize, that no matter how much things have changed — or which way the planet spins or the stars align — there will always be constants and patterns and recurring themes, fixed like a compass arrow pointing due north. 

Sitting at the basin’s edge of Bethesda Fountain, coin pinched tightly between his fingers, is a pretty good example of this.

His ex-boyfriend, apparently, is another.

Because history has a real _hilarious_ way of repeating itself like that.

And it isn’t fair, Lance thinks, feeling petulant for the way it makes him want to pout like a child. It isn’t fair that, even after tiptoeing around the cracks so carefully, just the slightest tumble — _those eyes, up close, dark and burning like midnight flames_ — can shatter him so irrevocably. It isn’t fair that all those painstaking months spent licking his wounds still didn’t seem to get all the blood out, even though Lance did everything he was supposed to do. He sobbed himself dry, he threw shit at the walls, he sent long-winded voicemails, and then hated himself for it the next day. In between, he tried laughing the loudest, and smiling the brightest, but he couldn’t, and it just isn’t _fair_, it isn’t, _it isn’t_. 

It isn’t fair that, even after all this time, Keith still gets to ruin his life.

But the fact of the matter is this: Lance hasn’t been able to shake Keith out of his brain since their unfortunate reunion at the bar, and he didn’t come all the way back here just to wander down the same dead-end paths, retracing his footsteps, over and over, until the ground gives and swallows him whole.

He came here to turn his life around, to find that special something it’s been missing.

Something _extraordinary_.

Lance stares down at the coin in his grasp, twirls it between his fingers.

_Please, oh, please let him find it this time._

The penny goes soaring through the air, and then plops into the water with a resounding —

“Arr-ooo!”

He whirls around to see a giant bundle of black and white fur galloping toward him at top speed, leaving him no time to react before he’s being tackled, nearly toppling backwards into the water.

Then a voice cries out, deep and commanding: “Kosmo!”

Sadly, there’s no time to react to _that_, either.

Keith comes bounding down the trail, all windswept and sweat-sheened in his jogging clothes, headphones dangling loose around his neck. “Kosmo, you can’t just —”

The exact moment he notices Lance is painfully obvious. He skids to a stop, muscles freezing, eyes widening.

“Hi,” croaks Lance.

Keith’s chest heaves a solid three times before he’s able to respond. “Hi,” he breathes.

“Hi,” Lance says again. _We already did that part, genius._ “Um —”

“Sorry about…” mumbles Keith, nodding down at where Kosmo is currently sniffing and pawing at Lance’s jeans. “He doesn’t usually —”

“I know,” Lance blurts, because he’s stupid. He immediately corrects it to, “It’s fine.” And then, because he’s _exceptionally_ stupid, he adds, “At least there’s no glassware to break this time, right?” 

Something flashes across Keith’s features, quick as a spark, then flees. Whatever it was, it had looked unpleasant and complicated, and not even close to resembling amusement. 

Lance’s face burns brighter than a wildfire.

And just when he starts to think this blundering exchange can’t get any more tragic, Keith has to go and ask, “So, how are you?”

“I’m — _fabulous_.” God. What the hell. Lance has _never_ used that word before _in his life_. “And busy. Super busy. With the coffee shop. Which is mine now. In case you didn’t know.”

Keith considers this with a frown. “I thought you’d still be at school.”

“Well, I thought you’d still be on the other side of the friggin’ country, so _surprise_, looks like we both got it wrong.”

In the ensuing silence, Keith’s expression does something else, just as horrible and vague as before. It makes Lance want to scream. Keith’s eyes have always had a way of revealing all his secrets, too candid for his own good, and Lance could always read it off him like a book, but now —

_Maybe I’m just out of practice_, Lance thinks, a little bitter, a little bewildered.

“Guess I should —” he begins muttering, at the exact same time Keith opens his mouth to go, “So, do you —”

They blink dumbly at each other.

“Sorry,” they both say, then, still in unison. 

God, what a _disaster_.

“Um,” Lance forces out quickly, as to not prolong this torture more than necessary, “I just — I should probably go.”

“Right,” says Keith, equally as quick. “Let’s go, Kosmo.”

But the dog just cowers behind Lance’s legs, ears folded downward as he whines like a pup, and doesn’t move. Lance coughs awkwardly into his fist. 

Keith snaps his fingers, frustrated. “Kosmo. _Come_,” he orders again, and, mournfully, the dog obeys, trotting over to his master’s side without so much as another whimper.

Lance is standing, brushing off the seat of his pants when he hears, “Lance.”

It cuts straight through him, a devastating swipe of a blade.

“You, um,” Keith, holding himself rigid, is saying. Trying to say. His gaze is steady, but guarded. “You can come by the bar, anytime. If you want.”

“I know,” says Lance, still reeling, somehow.

With that, Keith makes to leave, Kosmo in tow. And as Lance watches him fade into the sunlit backdrop of Central Park, he’s struck, suddenly, by the strangest sense of déjà vu. Of themes recurring. Of history, once again, repeating.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're feeling like there are still many pieces missing from this puzzle, then you're absolutely right lol. As you can probably already gather from the alternating past/present timeline, this story has been designed in such a way that things will come together the further we go along. So hang tight! <3 
> 
> If anyone is particularly curious, the Silversun Pickups' song that's playing when Lance and Hunk walk into Luxite is called "Panic Switch". Knowing this has absolutely no effect on the plot whatsoever, but I do think it's mildly hilarious given the circumstances of that scene. 
> 
> Speaking of music, I put together a playlist for this fic! Songs will likely be added along the way. You can give it a listen right [HERE](https://open.spotify.com/user/e2276kfgaep4nvsh9f4zjq9h0/playlist/0CROuZs0SFw5RSegp8oaFD?si=wav9e2tFTN2K0HlW9kKSWg)! 
> 
> @cosmic-canvas already drew some gorgeous fanart of the boys, go check it out [HERE](https://cosmic-canvas.tumblr.com/post/185330166830/i-literally-just-cant-contain-myself-any-longer)!  
@aydudenoway also drew Lance looking like a cutie-patootie in his work apron, go check it out [HERE](https://aydudenoway.tumblr.com/post/185649372199/so-starlightments-is-amazing-and-im-so-excited)! 
> 
> [TUMBLR](https://starlightments.tumblr.com/) (i tag fic spoilers!)  
[TWITTER](https://twitter.com/starlightment)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for being patient with me while I cranked out this next chapter! The holidays seemed to slow me down way more than I thought they would lol. But it's another long one, so hopefully that makes up for the wait!

**. . .**

**then.**

“So, lemme get this straight,” says Rachel, sounding for all the world stumped. “You two _really_ like each other.”

Her unexpected proximity has the milk pitcher in Lance’s grasp going cockeyed while he’s mid-pour, slashing straight through the latte art he’d been in the meticulous process of crafting — an intricate little hummingbird that now has what appears to be an extra wing protruding from its beak, thanks to the disturbance. He shoots a withering look over his shoulder, where his sister is hovering, practically breathing her puzzlement down his neck as if Lance has just spent the last fifteen minutes reciting mathematical equations out of a quantum physics textbook rather than regaling her with the newest updates about his so-called love life. 

“Wow,” he drones sarcastically. “Your deduction skills? Second to none, sis.” 

“_And_ you’re sleeping together,” she chirps right into his ear. 

Lance rolls his eyes, still deadpan. “Scandalous.” 

“And you’re spending time together, like, _consistently _—”

“Are you still talking? How long is this gonna take?”

“— but you’re saying he’s _not_ your boyfriend?”

Finally fed up, most of all by the nagging, Lance begins swatting at her ineffectually, and Rachel sidesteps out of the way. “I _told_ you, we’re not doing that,” he explains with a disgruntled huff.

“Well,” she needles, “then what happens when Keith starts ‘_not doing that’_ with someone else, too, hmm?”

“_He’s not_,” Lance barks, abruptly furious, something vile rising through him like a tidal wave of molten lava. Rachel arches a knowing brow at him, and the longer they hold each other’s gazes, the more Lance starts to realize how his outburst must’ve sounded: the protest of a scorned lover, wrought with crippling jealousy. Grumbling, he reaches for a plastic lid, snaps it onto the botched latte, and slides it to the edge of the counter, ready for pick-up. “I mean, look, not like it’s actually any of your business, anyway, but he and I aren’t doing _that_, either.”

Rachel keeps staring, looking distinctly unimpressed. “So you’re exclusively… _not_ dating each other.” 

“I dunno,” Lance sighs. “What label comes before the labels?”

“Boink buddies? Bum chums? Partners in —” 

“_Jesus_. Never mind, I take it back, no more labels.” 

Her brow arches even higher.

“What?” he sniffs, defensive. “You literally just said _bum chums_, out loud, _unironically_, so you’re not allowed to judgy-eyebrow anything I do, like, ever again.”

“I’m not _judging_,” says Rachel, to which Lance promptly scoffs. “I just think it’s weird not calling someone your boyfriend even though this someone is acting _exactly_ like your boyfriend.”

“Feeling pretty judged right now, gotta say.”

Now it’s Rachel’s turn to sigh. “You do realize,” she muses, “that this isn’t gonna keep you from getting attached to him, right?” 

“Nobody’s getting attached to anyone!” Lance cries, hands flapping emphatically.

With that, he turns away, but still ends up catching a glimpse of Rachel’s expression, her nose all scrunched up dubiously. Lance breezes past her with as much dignity as he can muster, trying to busy himself by opening the glass display case and readjusting all the assorted pastries into precise little lines. Rachel follows close behind, sidles up next to him, and shoves the display case shut before he’s done. Lance recoils just in the nick of time, narrowly avoiding his fingers getting crushed.

“Maybe not technically,” she carries on, “but _emotionally_… you cling like a baby koala, Lance.” 

“Lies!” he rails.

“Hello? Have you met yourself?”

“Listen, I’ll have you know that I had a Tinder account for_ two whole months_,” Lance informs her snootily. “So I know all about casual relationships, thank you very much.”

“That’s not how that works,” she says.

“That’s not how your _face_ works.”

Affronted, Rachel flicks a nearby Splenda packet that hits Lance squarely in the nose. He counterattacks on instinct, reverting to his feisty ten-year-old self as he scoops up an entire handful of packets and dumps them over his sister’s head. That’s all it takes to provoke a full-fledged sugar war, so merciless and reckless in its enthusiasm that they both fail to notice the swinging of the door and the tinkling of the bell. And so Lance winds up flat on his ass on the tiled floor, using a serving tray as a shield while simultaneously scrabbling for more ammunition when he hears that deep, delicious rumble of a voice: 

“Bad time?”

Lance leaps to his feet, eyes brightening, and squeaks, “Keith!”, right as an errant sugar packet smacks him in the cheek. He ignores it, scurrying over to the register where Keith is looking on, his head cocked delicately like a cat sizing up a canary. A kiss is exchanged, warm and chaste, Lance leaning across the counter to peck the simpering smile off Keith’s lips before it can grow double in length. 

And in the brief moment they meet, Lance feels weightless, floating up and out of his body, then crashing back down into the tether of Keith’s hands, tucked securely behind his neck. A soft, steady place to land.

“Hi,” he breathes, woozy.

And Keith replies, “Hi.”

“Mm.” Lance outright preens, seemingly and endlessly pleased by Keith’s attention. “Skipping work to come flirt with the handsome barista, I see.”

“You can let the handsome barista know that I’m on my break,” Keith returns drolly.

“Ah, but you _are_ flirting with me.” 

“If I say yes,” says Keith, “do I get free coffee?”

Lance smirks gamely at him. “Among other rewards.”

“_Lance_,” Keith warns, except the faint flush lighting up his cheeks automatically gives him away. Lance winks very deliberately — if only for the joy of watching Keith’s face stain even pinker — as he ducks behind the espresso machine.

It has arguably become his most favorite part of the day; when Keith drops by for a customary pick-me-up, when Lance gets to show off — just a _little_ bit — by putting all his hard-earned brewing expertise to good use. He goes the extra mile for Keith, taking care to grind the beans into a fragrant powder, aerating the soy milk to a light, silky-smooth texture, just the way his abuela taught him. A deft swivel of his wrist tops the whole thing off, an ornate heart design drizzled into the foam that Keith won’t even be able to see once it disappears under the lid, but, regardless, Lance still finds it exceptionally satisfying.

“Here’s your imposter cappuccino, latte boy,” he announces, that smug little half-grin aimed directly at Keith, who snorts gruffly in response and brings the cup to his mouth. One sip has him nearly spewing all over the place, clamping down on his scorched tongue with a vengeance. 

And Lance, for his part, manages to suck in his bottom lip before an affectionate whimper can slip out, so ridiculously endeared by this boy it physically hurts. “Yeah, see, that’s the thing about hot drinks,” he points out. “They’re really _hot_.”

Keith’s brow furrows with defiance, and Lance’s heart bubbles anew. “Shut up,” he grumbles, holding eye contact while he goes in for another sip, like an insolent toddler. Judging by his pained grimace and the miserable gurgling noise he makes when he swallows, he regrets his decision just as much as the first time.

“Oh my god. You’re so dumb. The _actual_ dumbest.” Lance bends himself over the counter again, arms outstretched. “Gimme that dumb face.”

He places another kiss there, long and enamored, softening the downturned slope of Keith’s frown in slow, tender increments. Keith’s fingers find apron straps to hook onto, tugging just gently enough, and _oh_ — he parts his lips, starts kissing back in earnest, and when he inhales Lance can feel it living in his bones, breath curling sharp in his own lungs.

“Please,” he sighs a bit desperately against the corner of Keith’s mouth. “Please tell me you’re free tonight.”

Keith lets out a regretful hum, twisting away from Lance’s mouth to mutter, “Shiro needs me to bartend.”

“After?” says Lance, leaning in to seek out Keith’s lips again.

“It’s the late shift,” Keith returns, dodging the kiss. “I’m stuck there ’til we close.”

Lance grumbles, and leans in a second, more persistent time until their foreheads bump together. “_Boo_,” he huffs childishly.

“But you could wait up for me,” suggests Keith. 

“Like, at the bar?”

“Or…” Keith cuts himself off, as if carefully debating over his next words. “…at my place.”

The words come out low and wary, something softly shaped into sound. Lance feels the need to question it, and he opens his mouth to do so, but then Keith is removing a silver key from his pocket without any preamble or explanation.

Lance pulls back to properly squint at it, and goes, “Oh.” 

Then, with a determined little frown, Keith places the key very diligently into Lance’s hand, closes his fingers around it, and Lance repeats, “_Oh_,” once more with feeling.

“It’s yours,” Keith tells him, voice small, “if you want.”

Lance wants. “I wanna kiss you some more,” he says, and he’s going for coy and confident but the way Keith is looking at him, as though there’s something electric stretching out syrupy-slow between them, hits Lance sideways and it slips out like a longing whisper.

Keith nods jerkily.

“This is a _professional work environment_, you saucy little lovebirds!” Rachel calls out from somewhere behind them, where she’s no doubt been spying on the pair, every bit a meddling spectator.

Lance rolls his eyes and sways forward a fraction, mouth angled and expectant.

Keith captures his lips in a hurried kiss. Breaks apart, and then immediately dives in for another. And another. Fingers bury into the wispy brown curls at Lance’s nape, and —

“You’re gonna be late!” Lance yelps, maybe laughs, between stolen kisses.

“Mhm,” says Keith, like muffled amusement, which billows into something big and buoyant once Lance finally manages to nudge him off and shoo him away.

At the door, Keith pauses and waves as he’s about to leave. Lance waves back, feeling giddy. Feeling downright wobbly-kneed and stupid-happy. He’s clutching that key to his chest like it’s precious treasure, trying not to shake apart on the inside, when Rachel’s voice chirrups in his ear again.

“Right,” she drawls, “so what were you just saying about _casual_ relationships?”

More Splenda packets go flying. 

* * *

The door swings open, a quick flash of hallway fluorescents bleeding into the pitch blackness. Lance comes shuffling inside, a bulging grocery bag cradled in one arm so he can use the other to ease the door shut with a muted click. The light shrivels up behind it, and then the room becomes all shadow.

He stands paralyzed on the entry mat, skin crawling, terrified to make a peep, as if doing so will set off some hair-trigger alarm. Entering Keith’s personal space has never felt quite this daunting before, but, then again, Lance has never tried without Keith being here to buzz him in, or to greet him with a smirk at the top of the stairwell, where Keith yanks Lance in by the front of his shirt and pushes him up against the door, kissing him senseless like he can’t wait another second for it, hard enough to get Lance’s blood pumping, but never enough to bruise. 

It’s different and markedly unusual this time around, though, now that there’s nothing but vexing silence within the cramped confines of Keith’s apartment, all laid out like foreign land, dark and uninhabited. As Lance’s gaze sweeps over it, a sudden rush of doubt floods through him. He still can’t shake the uncertainty. His entire body feels like a disruption, like an intruder, misplaced and estranged, until that shiny piece of silver, hot against his palm, reminds him of the truth: Keith wants him here. Trusts him enough to _let_ him be here — and unsupervised, at that.

So Lance kills a good ten seconds just rubbing the pad of his thumb along the key’s jagged teeth, grounded by the back-and-forth motion, the soothing validity of it, and then tosses the key into a tiny ceramic tray by the entrance like he’s seen Keith do about a dozen times before. He’s toeing off his scuffed-up sneakers, right next to a pair of Keith’s running shoes, when he hears the unmistakable pitter-patter of paws stampeding into the room. 

“Hey, big guy, long time no see,” Lance says to the giant husky skittering happily around his feet. He bends down to offer some tender ear scratches, but Kosmo appears to be far more focused on the groceries, sniffing and nipping until Lance hoists the bag out of reach. “Whoa, easy there. You must be pretty hungry, huh?”

Kosmo sits back on his haunches, woofing in affirmation.

“C’mon, then, show me where your dad keeps your food.”

Together, they head for the kitchen. Kosmo is rather unhelpful when it comes to locating the kibble, responding to Lance’s questions with clueless tail wags and little else, so it takes a bit of trial and error, a bit of futile rummaging through some very sparsely-stocked cabinets, before Lance is filling his bowl to the brim. The dog gives an appreciative yip for all the effort, and then digs in with gusto, snout first.

Keith’s fridge, Lance learns after poking his head inside, is in an even sorrier state than the cabinets. He examines the inadequate stash with a small scowl. Eggs, Red Bull, expired soy milk, a random assortment of half-used condiments, a plastic tub filled with spaghetti and a sticky note on the lid that reads, _‘Adam wants his tupperware back - S’_. More Red Bull.

Something about this discovery makes Lance’s heart pinch tight. In his head, he sees Keith making himself a cup of low-grade coffee and barely chugging the whole thing down before hurrying out the door. Keith bouncing between all his various odd jobs and music gigs around the city. Keith dragging himself home at the end of a long day, dead-tired on his feet, picking at cold pasta straight from the container. Lance huffs under his breath, greatly distraught by these images, and begins stuffing his groceries into the near-empty fridge with a newer, fiercer urgency.

Thank goodness he stopped by the market on his way here because he has a dreadful inkling that it’s been a while since Keith last indulged in a home-cooked meal — his brother’s leftovers, notwithstanding — and Lance plans on making this a truly unforgettable one. Hopefully Keith has some wine stored away somewhere. Some candles, too, just for a dash of added finesse. He makes a mental note to go searching for some later.

But first things first: a shower. If Lance is seriously committing to this charming little ploy of his, then no way in hell is he going through with it while reeking of burnt coffee beans and sweat.

It’s only after he emerges from the bathroom, all damp-haired and thoroughly scrubbed, that he remembers he doesn’t have a change of clothes.

Lance usually takes his sweet time after a shower, lounging around towel-clad in the westside two-bedroom he shares with Hunk, but that level of casual immodesty isn’t a luxury he’s being afforded here. He doesn’t want Keith to come home and get the wrong idea, anyway, like Lance has cleverly manipulated this entire evening for the sole purpose of seduction. Like he’s only interested in these newfound key-wielding privileges when he’s half-naked and ready to pounce.

The pouncing, he decides, will happen later, after Keith has been sufficiently romanced by the _very_ impressive dinner that Lance is going to whip up for them, but whatever. _Details_. The point is that, right now, he needs something to wear. 

His gaze flits curiously in the direction of Keith’s wooden dresser, then darts away. Oh… He shouldn’t. It’d be weird, wouldn’t it? Rooting through kitchen cabinets for some dog food is one thing, but snooping around in Keith’s drawers would be a total invasion of privacy. Disrespectful. Uncouth. _Incriminating_, probably.

Except Lance’s impulse control is downright traitorous, and he snoops. Just a tiny bit. Just enough to grab what he needs. Something cozy, if possible, because Keith always keeps his apartment cold as an icebox, regardless of how often Lance complains about frostbite every time he gets up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. He settles on a pair of checkered pajama bottoms, a maroon-colored sweatshirt, and —

_Jackpot_.

From the deepest, most sequestered depths of the top drawer, Lance proudly brandishes a pair of socks. Thick, fuzzy, and — best of all — adorned with dancing cartoon hippos. He slips them on and wiggles his toes with glee, thrilling at how Keith will likely deny ownership of these until his last dying breath. Lance can’t wait to see him try.

He moseys back into the living room, wandering the floor aimlessly the way one might peruse the winding halls of a museum, pausing every so often to adjust a crooked book on the shelf or gather a jumbled stack of papers into a neat pile on the upturned-crate-slash-coffee-table. Keith’s place is a little on the messy side, and Lance suspects he prefers it that way, because some clutter makes it feel more lived in — slightly less lonely, perhaps — like it isn’t just him and Kosmo here most days, with Shiro stopping by just to check in or drop off a week’s worth of tupperware meals before returning home to his husband.

Lance thinks hard about it. He thinks about Keith, and how he tosses and turns in bed every night, except the ones where Lance is pressed up against him. And when they wake, Keith’s face is always a little too bewildered, as though he’s somehow surprised that Lance is still here, filling the space between these barren walls with sunshine and color and loud, ringing laughter. 

He thinks about the key again, and begins to realize that maybe it means more than a simple solution to their busy schedules. Maybe it means Keith will have something nice to come home to, for once.

Maybe it means _please stay_.

Lance’s head spins madly, lost and churning with wonder.

_What a thought._

His ambling leads him toward a mountain of cardboard boxes in the corner. There are dozens of them, stacked high, each one practically ripping at the seams with vinyl records and labeled by genre in black marker. It looks like the kind of collection that might take years to accumulate, perhaps even lifetimes. Beside it, a vintage turntable sits atop another overturned crate, with a glossy record already positioned on the platter. Lance, simply unable to resist stealing a peek, reads off the front of it: _‘Greatest Love Songs, Vol. II’._

“Sap,” he whispers fondly, a grin curling his lips. He’s delighted, he finds, by the concept of Keith — cool, edgy, prickly-on-the-surface Keith — listening to schmaltzy love ballads in his spare time. For unfathomable reasons, it just _does_ things to Lance’s insides. Mushy things. Silly, fluttery, disgustingly gooey things that he can’t seem to curb no matter how hard he tries. 

Lance moves the needle onto the record. Static, crackling soft and low, warms the room, followed by a soulful piano tune.

_Maybe I’m amazed at the way you love me all the time…_

As Lance throws himself onto the futon, a pathetic sigh gusting out of his lungs, he’s feverishly overcome with sensation. Keith’s scent, his music, his _everything_. It surrounds him, seeps into the cavities of his heart all at once, dancing behind his eyelids like starbursts as he lays here, right here, where he’s carved out a comfy little space for himself in Keith’s world.

And maybe he wouldn’t mind staying here for a little while. 

Maybe…

He drifts off, gradually, to the dreamy afterimage of Keith’s smile. 

_… maybe I’m afraid of the way I love you…_

Later — though how much later he can’t quite tell — Lance feels the gentle pressure of a palm on his back, sliding its way up his spine, then down again. His lashes flicker, eyes creaking open barely enough to see Keith, all bleary and beautiful, crouched beside the futon where Lance’s cheek is smooshed against the cushion.

“Hey, you,” says Keith.

“Hey,” Lance rasps. Then: “Wait. What time s’it?”

“Late. I just got back.”

It takes a delayed beat for Lance to process this, sleep-addled brain working slow. The apartment has grown far darker than he remembers, just a single floor lamp casting its dim glow across the room. Distantly, he can hear the turntable still spinning, a dulcet melody still crooning in the background like a lullaby, which can only mean one thing.

“_Nooo_,” Lance moans out a pitiful whine. “I was supposed to — _ugh_, I had plans. _Plans_, Keith. I was gonna make you dinner, and woo your pants off, and — you were gonna be so _wooed_.”

“Mhm,” is all Keith offers in response, distracted. He leans in to drag his lips down the curve of Lance’s jaw, and purrs into the skin there, “I like when you wear my clothes.”

“M’serious,” Lance pouts. “Wanted you to have something nice to come home to.”

Keith grins adoringly at that and withdraws, his eyes crinkled at the corners as he regards Lance through the silvery veil of half-light. “You’re nice enough, I guess.”

“Wow, thanks.”

A chuckle rumbles out of Keith, and Lance can feel the warmth of it blossom inside his own chest, pushing up against his ribs. He tries in vain to calm it, but Keith’s fingertips are already reaching out, brushing a matted tuft of hair off his forehead in one delicate stroke. Lance allows it, dizzily, with his heart stuck in his throat.

“Do you wanna keep sleeping?” Keith whispers. 

“Well, I _did_,” mumbles Lance.

“But?”

“But then you reminded me that I never got around to making dinner, and now I’m starving.”

“I brought take-out,” Keith tells him.

“Holy cheese,” Lance sighs contentedly, “you really _are_ perfect,” and then Keith swoops forward, kissing him over and over, like he just can’t help himself. 

* * *

**now.**

Daybreak is creeping timidly through the clouds — just so that the dew-dappled streets shimmer under its glow, just so that the line of skyscrapers looks more bronze than chrome, just so that the air hangs heavy with languid gold, like the promise of midsummer heat — by the time Lance arrives at the café, digging into his shoulder bag for the keys. His mouth drops open on a yawn, so enormous and ear-popping that he misses the slight scrape of footsteps plodding up the stoop behind him.

“Hey.”

Lance jolts violently at the sound, keys slipping from his grasp. He fumbles for them a second too late and they fall through his fingers, clattering to the concrete with a metallic clink. When he swivels toward the source, it’s all he can do to keep from outwardly gasping in Keith’s face because it’s _right there_ in front of his own, much closer than expected, and has Lance bracing up against the door like cornered prey, cheeks throbbing with color.

“Oh, uh,” he squeaks. “Hi.”

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” says Keith, his gaze flickering down. He makes to reach for the fallen keys, but Lance reacts quicker, dropping to the ground and scooping them up before Keith can beat him to it, some stubbornly embittered part of his hindbrain flat-out refusing to acknowledge Keith’s courtesy. 

“Scare? Me? _Hah_. Yeah. Right.” Lance pulls himself up, glaring. “Only thing remotely scary about you is your freaky ninja walk.”

“I’m not a ninja,” Keith tells him, blankly.

“Which is exactly what an undercover dojo spy _would_ say.”

Keith’s mouth ticks up at that, amused, light cutting through the grayish-blue of his eyes so that they look even brighter, even easier to get lost in, and Lance finds himself suddenly and overwhelmingly irritated by the sight. He wants to shove Keith away with all his strength. Wants to cradle Keith’s stupid face and kiss the corners of that stupid, attractive mouth until dimples bloom beneath his lips. Instead, he stands there and continues to glare.

“So what do you want?” he blurts rudely, over the sound of his own stuttering heart.

“Um,” Keith mumbles, his smile vanishing like water down the drain, “just — coffee?”

This only seems to irritate Lance even further, the tight furrow of his brow demanding of a punchline, or some poorly-delivered witticism, because surely this must be a joke —

Except Keith doesn’t break, not even a little, not even when Lance narrows his gaze to flaming flints, egging him on. There’s no hint, or tinge, or fleeting undertone of humor showing up on that hopelessly oblivious expression, and Lance — _well_. He can’t say he’s surprised, considering. Keith’s comedic timing has always been a somewhat questionable work in progress.

“You want — yeah, sure, whatever,” he mutters at long last, opening the door and gesturing noncommittally for Keith to walk through. “Come in, I guess.”

Lance hits the lights at about the same time he takes off toward the counter. If he bows his head just right, then he won’t even have to see Keith standing there, ill at ease, loitering by the pick-up corner with his hands stuffed into his pockets, and Lance can just pretend like he’s any other nondescript customer waiting for their regular soy milk cappuccino, light foam. No awkward eye contact or small talk required. He goes through the motions, mechanically, hands responding to such ingrained muscle-memory that it prickles like pins and needles all along his skin.

“Here,” grunts Lance, thrusting forth the finished drink a bit too brusquely. 

“You remembered my order,” comes Keith’s reply. He reaches for the cup, and their hands bump clumsily. Lance feels it like a heat-rush racing up his arm.

“Helps that you have, like, the lamest coffee order I’ve ever heard in my life, so.”

Then Keith thanks him for the drink, and Lance shrugs a little. His throat feels strangely tight, like his next words are suddenly important, like they need to mean something bigger. _You’re welcome, I’m sorry, I hate how much I miss you_. Too many things left unsaid, too much time passed for most of them to really matter anymore, and Keith just nods like he knows exactly what’s going through Lance’s mind.

That makes one of them, at least.

As soon as Keith leaves, Lance can breathe again, and his brain goes so wonky that he has to bolt for the sound-proofed walk-in freezer and scream into his hands for a solid minute. And that, he thinks, is that.

Until the following day, when Keith visits again.

And the day after that.

And the day after _that_.

And the day after —

You get the picture. 

Lance is just as confused by the whole thing as he is frustrated. Like, what’s the objective here? What does Keith think he’ll gain from these spontaneous drop-ins, anyway? He doesn’t even _speak_ to Lance, minus that one time, maybe a few days into their little routine, when he tries to ask how his morning is going, and Lance pretends not to hear him over the whir of the espresso machine. But aside from that, Keith just dawdles around in a stoic silence, looking tense and restless on the receiving end of Lance’s harrowing stink eye. 

Because, honestly? There’s just no feasible reason why Keith can’t do them both a favor and walk an extra block to the nearest Starbucks, like any decent human being would, especially since Lance has been putting in such a concerted effort to avoid these unwanted encounters. He sneaks out the back alleyway to go on his lunch breaks, crouches under countertops every time he spots a glimpse of some dark-haired figure strolling by the window, and yet Keith, in spite of all this, _still_ perseveres — which is, admittedly, so on brand of him that Lance could almost laugh, if he weren’t already working himself up into a tizzy over it.

And though Lance isn’t shy about broadcasting these unfavorable feelings of his, Keith seems either utterly desensitized or perhaps clueless — which, again, on brand — to all of Lance’s snarking and scowling. He returns, day after day, and Lance fixates on the small, cautious slant of his parting grin for much longer than he should.

The convenient thing about the café is that it gives Lance something else to focus on. Gives him something to throw his whole mind into, gives his brain a place to go that isn’t backwards. Because that’s been his plan all along, hasn’t it? He concentrates on breathing, on his pulse, on the weight of his bones inside his own body, on the steady stream of customers trickling through the door.

It helps. It’s a reliable distraction, one that he so desperately wants and needs, except Keith’s recurring presence, like a permeating smudge on Lance’s heart, is just another sign pointing back to before.

* * *

“_Three dollars_,” Lance exclaims in a fluster later that week, sitting on the countertop, legs dangling over the edge. “Three whole dollars, Hunk! Can you believe that? He just crams it into the tip jar, right in front of me, didn’t even _hesitate_, as if he _didn’t_ just shell out more than _half_ of that for his stupid drink already.” 

“Wait,” says Hunk, his hand pausing above the bowl of marzipan filling he’d been in the middle of whisking. “So you’re mad… that he tipped you?”

Lance huffs, sounding mildly put-upon. “It’s not _just_ about the tip, dude,” he insists. “It’s this whole — _thing_ he’s doing. Coming in here, barging in on _my_ new life, like he just wakes up one morning and thinks ‘gee, Lance sure looks like he’s in a good, healthy headspace for once. Better go throw a big, fat, three-dollar _wrench_ into _that_ plan’.”

Hunk shrugs peaceably. “Maybe he thought he was being nice.”

“Well, then he should have his thinking privileges revoked because _clearly_ he sucks at it.”

That’s when Hunk sets his bowl down entirely. Whisk cast aside, fists on his hips, and _oh_. Shit’s about to get _real_. “Wanna know what I think?” he asks grimly.

Lance opens his mouth, then shuts it again, genuinely a bit afraid to respond. Lowering his gaze, he finally grumbles, “Thanks, doc, but I kinda didn’t come in for a consultation today, so…” 

“All I’m gonna say,” Hunk barrels on, unimpeded, “is that I think you might be taking this a little too far, Lance. I mean, I know it’s hard seeing him here again after everything — believe me, I get it, I do — but, if you think about it, it’s not like Keith is really doing anything objectively _wrong_ in this scenario. In fact, he’s kinda going out of his way to be _civil_, y’know? Don’t you think it’d be better and, like, way less stressful for you and everyone else’s sake if you just accepted that? Maybe? ‘Cause, no offense, buddy, but you keep making it sound like you wanna be this new and improved version of yourself when it seems to me like you’re not even _trying_ to take the high road. It’s like you don’t even _want_ to move on. Instead you’re getting so caught up painting Keith out to be this big, bad villain who’s, like, silently plotting your emotional downfall because it’s easier to pretend you hate him than it is to admit you’re still hurting over him.”

“I —” Lance splutters unintelligibly, “I’m — that’s not —” 

Hunk reaches for his coffee, concluding sagely, “I rest my case,” and then takes a very long, glorified slurp.

Lance doesn’t quite know what to say to that — to the erratic thump in his chest like he’s just committed a crime and nearly gotten away with it — so he pouts, vehemently and in Hunk’s direction, until he notices, for the first time all morning, really, he actually _notices_ — 

In an instant, his expression goes sour, sinking into his face. “What’re you drinking?” he asks, deathly quiet.

Hunk freezes in place, deer-in-headlights style. “Nothing,” he eventually croaks.

“Hunk.” Lance slides off the counter, feet meeting the floor and striding forward with all the terrifying grace of a warrior, an animal on the prowl. “What’cha got there, big guy?” 

“Okay, Lance, just — before you come any closer, okay, I want you to remember what I was just telling you about taking things too far —”

The cup in Hunk’s hand isn’t one of theirs. It doesn’t _belong_ here. Lance knows this much for sure when he has his friend cornered, when he’s close enough to see that the cup has no writing on it at all. Just a plain black cup with a white emblem printed onto the cardboard. A pair of crossed blades, forming a small _x_. Recognition bowls Lance over like a devastating jab to the gut.

“Where did you get this?” he demands at once.

“I — I don’t remember.”

“Hunk!”

“Okay! Alright!” A brief, bloodcurdling pause. “From… next door.” 

Lance’s eye twitches, malfunctioning. “Next door,” he repeats, in a voice so throaty it barely sounds like his own. “Like, the bar. At the bar. You bought _coffee_ at a _bar_.”

“Well,” Hunk fidgets, cowering where Lance has him pinned between the counter’s edge and his menacing stare. “They serve brunch now, y’know?”

“…What.”

“But the _only_ reason I went over there is ‘cause I was curious, okay, Lance, I swear on my —” 

“Brunch?!” shrieks Lance, somewhat belatedly.

“ — like, their coffee isn’t even that good, anyway, it’s — _ugh_, I mean — so _bad_, just _so_ disgusting —”

“Gimme that!” Lance shrieks again, and snatches the offending cup right out of Hunk’s grasp. He takes an agitated sip. Winces. Takes another. Stops. And then: “Dammit!” he bellows. “It’s _delicious_!” 

With that, he whips himself around, and takes off like a bullet. 

“Lance, I don’t think I should let you walk outta here looking like that,” he vaguely hears Hunk calling after him. “You’ve got crazy eyes right now, man! _Crazy eyes_!”

The sound of the door flinging shut behind him brings Lance back to himself, if only for a second, if only long enough to process that he’s outside now, pounding down the stoop in a fit of red-visioned fury. He feels out of control, driven onward by some greater force that exists beyond his own trembling limbs. It leads him to the bar, to the banner hanging over the door that reads: _‘Now serving brunch, every day, 9am to 3pm’._

Suddenly, Lance thinks about the last time he’d been this mad, how it had been shortly after Keith left. He remembers the inescapable swell of it, like getting swept up in a tailwind. He remembers spitting Keith’s name as though it were poison, water in his lungs, and punching the doorframe so hard his entire hand remained sore for weeks. It had felt good, in the moment — or close enough to good. As in, not numb — but it hadn’t lasted. Lance had gone back to sobbing in Keith’s voicemail the very next day, a spineless, shivering mess. 

This time, though, he wants it to last. 

Because anything — _anything_, he prays — is better than what’s been going on lately. This empty shell of something. Better than Keith, here and within reach, and Lance having to bottle it all up before it can rush out of him, before he can get his lips around the wrong words, like _maybe we made a mistake_. It’s miserable. It’s unbearable. 

_Be mad_, Lance wills himself, knuckles blood-white and balled into fists at his side. _Stay mad._

He bursts through the front door. 

All around him, the room is a lively little pocket of white noise, low-hanging lights, and a sweetly maple-scented aroma. Almost every table on the main floor is occupied. Two different waiters zip by, balancing trays of french toast and spinach omelettes, in the time that it takes Lance to collect his breath, and when his attention shifts toward the bar, he finds Acxa, staring back at him with dull-eyed indifference as she mixes a Bloody Mary behind the counter. 

“Oh, it’s you,” she says, her voice a slow, monotonous drawl. “The _loud_ one.” 

Lance approaches, lips snarling into a surly pout, puffing up like a riled bird, ruffled feathers and all. “Don’t get _cute_ with me, sister,” he hisses, smacking a palm onto the countertop as if in fiery punctuation. The force of it rattles some of the glassware, but Acxa seems thoroughly unbothered. “Where is he?”

“Where’s who?”

“The friggin’ king of Eswatini, _obviously_,” snaps Lance. “Who do you _think_ I’m looking for?”

Sighing, Acxa skirts her lackluster gaze to the left, where Keith is now rounding the corner with a pen tucked behind his ear and a flannel knotted around his waist, but what really infuriates Lance the most is the clipboard in those fingerless-gloved hands of his. Like, an _actual_ clipboard. With a goddamn _spreadsheet_ on it. Just the mere sight of this guy — looking all pretentious and managerial and_ rugged_ — is the lightning-strike that Lance needs to jumpstart his anger. It buzzes low under his skin.

“Well, well, well,” Lance mocks from the sidelines. “Lookie what we have here. Mister restauranteur, hard at work. Boy, oh boy, a regular _Gordon Ramsey_ if I ever saw one —”

“Morning, Lance,” says Keith, one of his deeply concentrated frowns practically patented on his mouth. “What can we do for you?”

“Oh, _so_ happy you asked,” sneers Lance. He advances forward, double-pace. “I’ve got a couple requests, actually. Most of which involving all the _unpleasant places_ I think you oughta shove that fancy clipboard —”

Keith finally looks up from his paperwork, right into Lance’s scowling face, those stormy blue eyes. His hair is slightly wind-mussed, most likely caused by his frantic march over here, and Keith’s focus snags on the tiny curls around his forehead for a split second too long.

Then Lance says, “But you can start by telling me what the hell _this_ is.”

“Uh.” Keith glances over the proffered cup in rapid-fire appraisal. “That would be a cup of coffee.”

“Nope,” Lance retorts at once. “_Bzzt_. Wrong. This — this dirty abomination right here —” He waves the drink hysterically. Some coffee splatters onto the bar top below. “— this is called _sabotage_.” 

“What —” Keith tries to say, until he’s interrupted by Lance’s finger jabbing into his chest. 

“You heard me,” he lashes out. “Don’t think I’m not onto you. I see you slithering into the café every morning like a slippery little — _slitherer_. Gathering _intel_ just so you can try beating me at my own game. Well! Have I got some news for _you_, bucko. In case you haven’t been paying attention around here, coffee is _my_ turf. So _lay off_.”

A few slow beats tick by before Keith is able to register the reality, the accusation, the unflinching fight flashing behind Lance’s gaze. But when he does, it’s with a strange sort of satisfaction that Lance watches Keith reel back from him, hackles raised.

“You didn’t _invent_ coffee, Lance,” is what Keith decides to say in that moment, drawing his eyebrows together. He pushes Lance’s finger away with a stern swat. “And anyway, I’m not trying to beat whatever game you think — there _is_ no game. The bar’s expanding. It always has been. This is just —” 

“A coincidence? Likely story.”

“We’ve been planning this for months.”

“Then _un_-plan it!”

“Are you _kidding_, we can’t just —” Keith says, quick to fire back, but catches himself even quicker upon noticing the handful of stares aimed in their direction, piqued by the disturbance. His teeth clench so hard that Lance can almost hear the grinding. “— Christ,” he grumbles. “Do you always have to be such a —”

“_Don’t_ say what you’re about to say,” warns Lance. “Seriously, dude, do _not_, or else I’ll —”

Keith quirks his brow in challenge — _or else you’ll what?_ Lance chokes back the words, momentarily stricken by it, this achingly familiar push and pull strung between them, until the tension makes him squirm. 

He goes, a bit lamely, “I’ll… do something annoying. Yeah. I can be _really_ annoying when I put my mind to it, so I’ve been told. I have references, y’know, one of them probably being _you_ —”

“Look, if you’re _really_ going to make this into a problem,” says Keith, with a strain in his voice that sounds just shy of exasperation, “then take it up with Estela, not me.” 

Something sickening rolls over in Lance’s stomach.

“What?” he grits out at last.

“She’s the one who put me in touch with our coffee supplier,” Keith admits, and the way Lance stands there gawking, looking so flustered, so helplessly blindsided, has him adding with a sigh, “It was just a phone call, Lance.”

“I don’t care what it was!” Lance erupts at him, horrified, teetering on the cusp of a full-blown tantrum. “You lost your phone calling privileges with my family a long time ago, alright? That ship’s crashed and sunk and sailed off the end of the friggin’ earth.” 

Keith bristles. “All I did was ask for advice —”

“They’re not _your_ family anymore, Keith.”

He says it, probably, because he knows it’s likely to sting a little. Because he knows Keith, and Keith knows him, and that’s the danger of loving someone the way they loved each other: they already know which scars burn the brightest, which daggers twist the deepest, which blows land the nastiest. But Lance says it, anyway, feeling cold, feeling cruel, and then feeling a rapid whip-crack of guilt. Keith’s face is wiped clean of emotion, his mouth set like granite. Lance can sense his own expression morphing into something equally terrible when there’s a tug on his wrist, forcing him along at the risk of tearing it from its socket. 

Keith hauls him around the corner and crowds him into the wall until Lance’s spine sinks back against the brick. It’s just the two of them, hidden from view, and Keith, his eyes half-glowing, half-lost somewhere in the swath of shadow, whispers heatedly, “Why are you doing this?”

It’s nothing short of a plea. Lance wants to shrink away from it, to snap at it, because how dare Keith sound so _broken_. How dare he —

“‘Cause you’re standing in my way, that’s why,” Lance says with an ornery lift of his chin.

Keith swallows hard, then asks, “Of what?”

“Of — of _this_. Literally all of it. My job, my do-over, _my_ clean slate.” Lance can feel that buzz of anger from before, simmering so much closer to the surface now, a single pulse from overflowing. “I didn’t come all the way back here just to get screwed up again by _you_ —”

“You screwed yourself up, Lance —”

“— because you’re ruining _everything_, Keith, all you _ever_ do is ruin things —” 

“Yeah,” mutters Keith, sharp and scathing and all breath, “I’ve heard that one before.”

Lance stares for a panicked moment, rendered speechless, his heartbeat thundering so hard that it aches in his core, as memories scrape old scabs loose in his mind. He rips his wrist out of Keith’s hold before it’s too late and makes toward the door, only to be jerked back by the sleeve of his shirt. With a startled gasp, he stumbles into Keith’s chest, then spins around to glower at him.

Keith levels his look with the edge of a grimace he’s trying to smother down, dark and hard-lined and beautiful like how a blade is beautiful: tempered and fierce. He’s molded metal, all the way through, but his eyes are gentler than Lance expects them to be. Quiet and knowing, and piercing too deep into places Lance doesn’t want him to see anymore. It makes him livid in a way that only Keith can make him.

“I’m taking you down, Kogane, _so_ down,” he swears gravely, then. “Mark my words. You, and your lousy bar, and your — _stupid fucking clipboard._ God!”

This time, when he yanks himself free, Keith lets him go. Lance storms away, ignoring the brief glimmer of pain he sees reflecting back in Keith’s gaze as he brushes past. Because that’s just it. That’s the danger of loving someone — so madly, so ferociously — the way Lance loved Keith:

He already knows how badly it hurts to be walked out on.

* * *

**then.**

Lance is stirred awake by his phone vibrating on the nightstand. A quick glance at the pale, dawn-colored light filtering through the cracks in the blinds tells him that it’s early, far too early to be making phone calls by most social standards, and Lance only knows one person who regularly rings him at ungodly hours, without remorse.

Reluctantly, he untangles himself from Keith and answers the call with a groggy, “Hi, Mama.” 

She goes on to remind him that Veronica’s graduation party is on Saturday, and that he needs to arrive on time, and that he should probably bring some wine — something nice, nothing under fifteen dollars — and that he should _definitely_ make himself look presentable. No holes in his jeans, no wrinkles on his shirt, no —

He tries to pay attention to her instructions, really, but then he flops over and everything gets tuned out except for the exquisitely toned muscles and well-sculpted contours of Keith’s bare back; that sensuous little divot between his shoulder blades, smooth as rolling hills.

“Mhmm,” Lance mumbles deliriously, lips pressed against the highest knob of Keith’s spine.

“Lance,” his mother says. “Are you even listening to me?”

“M’all ears,” he slurs.

She exhales, unsatisfied. “What am I going to do with you.”

Amidst even more lecturing about time management and proper ironing technique, Lance finally decides to haul himself out of bed. Keith is sleeping soundly for once, and so he tiptoes into the living room, wearing nothing but the first pair of boxers he could manage to find on the bedroom floor.

Then his mother says, “You know we’re all expecting you to bring Keith along, right?” 

That puts an immediate halt in Lance’s stride. He shoots a look at the bedroom door, visualizing the warm heap Keith makes beneath the sheets, and says, “That’s, uh. Unnecessary.”

“I’m your _mother_, for heaven’s sake. I think I deserve to meet the boy who’s been taking up all your free time these days.”

It’s not an entirely unreasonable request, Lance supposes, albeit begrudgingly. The breaking news of his romantic escapades has recently become a trending topic within the family gossip mill, especially after Rachel — ever the wily mischief-maker — provided them all with photographic evidence, taken in secret while he and Keith had been sharing a particularly steamy goodbye kiss outside the café. It had caused quite a splash at the dinner table that evening, so, all things considered, their curiosity is valid.

And if subjecting poor Keith to a healthy dose of his family’s bizarre hazing rituals will put an end to his mother’s incessant badgering for good, then Lance is all in. A noble sacrifice must be made. 

Decided, he resolves to bring it up over lunch that afternoon, while Keith is strategically distracted by the basket of curly fries sitting between them.

“Um, so,” Lance begins, “my family’s having a thing this weekend. A party, for my sister. She just finished law school.”

Keith hums absently, dunking his fry into a small puddle of ketchup.

Lance twirls his own sauceless fry between his fingertips. “And I was thinking maybe you could — I mean, if you _want_ to — come? With me?”

He tries not to visibly cringe too hard at himself for sounding like such a gooey-eyed teenager, bashful and overeager in the presence of his sweetheart. Because that’s not what they are, not really, not exactly, and Lance highly doubts Keith’s willingness to explain as much to a whole house of big, brassy, interrogating McClains. It’d be ridiculous for Lance to assume that Keith would ever want to get tangled up in his wacky family, knowing it’s nothing more than a temporary fix, not intended to last beyond these summer months.

But then Keith, with his mouth still full of ketchup and curly fry, eventually says, a bit breathless, “You want me to meet your family?” 

“Don’t feel like you have to, like, _at all_,” Lance is quick to add. “They — I mean, they’re really _loud_, and my dad has the _worst_ jokes, and my mom’s a _serious_ hugger, and —”

“Okay.”

Lance blanches. “You — okay?”

“Okay,” Keith reiterates, going softer. “I’d love to.”

His lips give an imperceptible little quirk, like he’s being sieged by a swell of delight and doing his damnedest to rein it in. Lance’s stomach triple-flips all the way down to his knees. 

It’s not until the day of the party, however, that the nerves fully set in. The Brooklyn Bridge is an ominous two-hundred-foot behemoth towering in the distance, and Lance’s trusty old clunker of a car carries them closer and closer with each passing block. His bottom lip is trapped tightly between his teeth as he drives. He tinkers with the radio knob, impatient. His leg keeps bouncing so manically beneath the wheel that Keith has to reach out, bringing a hand down on his jiggling thigh to stop him. 

“Aren’t I supposed to be the nervous one?” he asks.

A laugh slips out, pitched high and shrill, and it makes Keith’s expression twitch doubtfully.

“… _Should_ I be nervous?”

“No! It’s fine. It’s great,” Lance assures. He snatches up Keith’s hand, kisses the back of it, and then laces their fingers together. “Today’s gonna go really well.”

It does not go well.

It goes _phenomenally_.

So phenomenally, in fact, that Lance would’ve never thought to predict it. Not that he’d been anticipating a train wreck or anything. After all, Keith has an endearingly awkward sort of charm that makes it virtually impossible not to adore him — though Lance knows he’s outrageously biased. But he also knows Keith to be honest, and genuine, and just enough on the good side of weird to fit in fantastically with the rest of Lance’s kooky relatives.

When they step through the doorway of that old brownstone townhouse, nestled in the quaint suburbs of Brooklyn, Keith is predictably ambushed, and he endures all the commotion with much more decorum than Lance ever thought him capable of, honestly. Lance’s mother is the first to wrangle him in, and, to Keith’s credit, he only looks uncomfortable for all of three seconds before he’s melting into the woman’s iron-like embrace. He humors Lance’s siblings, gathered in their finest form, as they swarm, and squeal, and take turns passing Keith around like a rag doll. They usher him into the living room, where Mrs. McClain immediately corners him with a tray of her freshly-baked butterscotch cookies. Keith, too respectful to decline, ends up having five.

“So are you guys, like, together or what?” Marco begins to pry after eyeing the two of them cuddling up on the couch, because Lance’s brother can be a tactless dolt like that.

Keith, with his arm snaked around Lance’s waist, unafraid and unembarrassed, simply replies, “We’re taking it one day at a time.”

Lance just presses himself a little closer into Keith’s side, his heart fluttering stupidly.

Once the initial wave of excitement finally dwindles down, things start operating at a much milder pace. Lance gets summoned to the kitchen, per his mother’s insistence, under the pretense of chopping vegetables for the salad, but Lance rightly suspects foul play. One of his family’s many absurdly cooked-up schemes, designed to lure the pair apart so they can have Keith all to themselves for a while. And, unfortunately, it works. It leaves Keith utterly stranded, none the wiser, as Lance is practically lugged out of the room by brute force.

He keeps an ear open, though, listening to Keith chat with Rachel about her prestigious internship at Nylon magazine, and with Luis about his hectic life as a stockbroker. Watches through the kitchen window as Keith makes pleasant conversation with Lance’s square-jawed father, who is outside flipping burgers on the grill, offering Keith a beer from the cooler, and chuckling in approval at how Keith gulps down half of it in one swig. 

Lance’s knife is splitting straight through a cucumber when Veronica nudges him and says, “Well, if _you_ aren’t gonna go for him, then maybe _I_ will,” which Lance, for the record, finds wildly unamusing. 

It isn’t until after dinner, as Lance and Keith are teaming up against the twins for a very make-or-break game of bean bag toss, that Estela comes into the yard, striding barefoot through the trimmed grass, to steal Keith away. And when Lance attempts to follow, she shoos him off like a pest. “I’ve been patient all day, niño,” she tells him with a smile. “Now it’s _my_ turn.”

She leads Keith toward the garden. Lance doesn’t know what they talk about over there on the swinging bench, under the dainty trill of wind chimes, just that Estela is leaning in close, almost like she’s whispering, a hand on Keith’s knee, and Keith looks positively awestruck, hanging on her every word. But his abuela has always had that sort of magic about her; drawing people in, and making even the simplest of moments feel like something special. The two of them stay like that until the horizon begins blooming with vibrant color. 

And so the day concludes just as it had started: _perfect_.

Still, though, even in the wake of such an idyllic afternoon, Lance can’t help but feel like he’s holding his breath, wondering when the inevitable bombshell will drop.

He wonders if Keith can sense it, too. Or if he already has. He wonders if Keith can see it in the way Lance’s older siblings pinch his cheeks and dole out their patronizing jabs, thinly masked behind a guise of tough love. The way his mother fusses with his clothes, tutting out her disdain as she says _‘I wish you hadn’t worn those ratty old shoes’_. He wonders if it’s been made painfully obvious, now, after an entire day spent in the company of McClains, with their rowdy laughter, and nosy questions, and mile-long laundry lists of lofty achievements, each one more impressive than the last. He wonders if Keith can already tell how woefully lacking Lance’s own list is in comparison, and if he’s asking himself — as Lance so often does — how someone like Lance could ever be good enough for a family as innately go-getting, talented, and accomplished as this one.

But if Keith does notice — which Lance believes he _must_, given how his insecurities might as well be stamped across his forehead in bright, blinking letters — then he says nothing about it, not even as they lay together, sometime later, on the hammock in the backyard. The light of the dying sun is a warm, amber glaze falling over them as they sway, legs entwined, Lance’s fingers carding lazily through Keith’s hair where it’s spilling out over his chest.

“I really like your family,” Keith tells him, a thoughtful lilt to his tone. 

“Thank god,” Lance sighs. “Sure would suck having to disown them if you didn’t approve.”

Keith snorts out an adorable little chuckle. “Don’t know why you were so nervous about today,” he says after a pause. “They’re pretty perfect.”

“Yeah. Perfect,” Lance echos hazily. It sinks down to the pit of his stomach and fizzes there. “Guess that’s always kinda been the problem.”

At this, Keith turns his head so that his chin is perched right on the center of Lance’s breastbone. He looks at him, a single brow raised in wordless question. 

“It’s just —” Lance says, and then stalls for the way he feels naked under Keith’s probing gaze. He tilts his eyes up and away, toward the rose-toned sky, and slowly inhales. “—Look at my parents, right? I can’t remember a time when they weren’t pulling crazy hours at the office, just to make sure they could put all five of their kids through school. And my siblings? Up-and-coming Wall Street tycoons, Ivy League graduates, with honors. And then Lita, she’s… I mean, I owe literally _everything_ to her. She’s amazing, like, she basically raised us, even when she had her own business to run.” The words are flowing freely now, tumbling down the hillside, unspooling. “And don’t get me wrong, I love them all to death, but… sometimes it’s — a lot to live up to. Like, what am I doing that even compares to any of that?”

Without hesitation, Keith answers, “You’re going to grad school.”

“Right,” mutters Lance, sounding a bit strangled. “Harvard Business, same program as my dad, so y’know. He’s super psyched about it.”

“And you’re not.”

He speaks it so plainly, so factually, like he’s able to sift through all the rampant thoughts in Lance’s too-fast brain and make sense of them, easy as anything, even when Lance himself struggles to keep up sometimes.

All Lance can do is blink, overwhelmed. “I dunno. Maybe? Never really had much of a choice, I guess. It’s either pack up, go to school, and… figure it out from there. Or stay here. Forever. Like a loser. While the rest of my sad, _unextraordinary_ life just passes me by and — _ow!” _

Keith strikes like a viper, ramming his elbow into the vulnerable flesh of Lance’s flank without mercy. The whole hammock jostles side-to-side as Lance writhes and groans beneath Keith’s weight.

“What the hell was _that_,” he whines, scrambling to shield his wounded side from another unsolicited assault. “Puncturing an innocent guy’s ribcage while he’s in the middle of a soul-bearing soliloquy? Who _raised_ you, heathen?”

But Keith says nothing as he peers down from above, his silhouette blocking the sky until he’s rimmed in an unearthly glow. Keith’s hands are hot on Lance’s neck, pulse quickening against guitar-calloused fingertips. A sharp breath slices out of Lance before he goes slack, surrendering.

“You’re an idiot,” Keith whispers, and then dips down to kiss him, soft. “A _huge_ idiot.”

Lance makes a low, desperate noise, capturing Keith’s mouth again and again, tipping even further over the cliff’s edge of need. He’s completely drunk on it. A stirring in his bones. A shiver on his skin. His hands have just found purchase on the small of Keith’s back when Keith pulls away, wringing another forlorn whimper from Lance’s lungs.

“You,” Keith whispers again, keeping their lips a fraction of an inch apart, his grip still steady and burning, “are the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met.” 

* * *

**now.**

The memory wholly dissolves behind his lids when he hears her approaching, footfalls crunching across the yard, louder than the tinkle of wind chimes dancing in the breeze. The sound of it grazes his skin like the edge of a rusty knife.

“You’ve been sulking for hours,” is what he hears next. Lance cracks open an eye to look at her. Estela’s unsmiling face hovers over him, surrounded by a mop of curls, flecks of red picked out amongst the grey beneath the early evening light.

“Funny how that’s a pretty standard reaction for someone who’s been betrayed by their own flesh and blood, don’tcha think?” he mumbles, sounding somehow both spiteful and weary. 

Estela heaves a breath. “Ay, this again?”

“To be clear — _this_ being you offering advantageous trade secrets to my ex-boyfriend-turned-archnemesis behind my back,” says Lance. “So yeah, this. _Again_.”

“Muévelo.”

Her tone is crisp, brooking no argument. And even though Lance is feeling salty enough to ignore her, he sits up in the hammock, anyway, spine going slightly ramrod-straight in two seconds flat because some part of him will always be intrinsically programmed to obey her commands. Estela sits beside him and scoops up one of his hands, clasps it tightly between her own.

“I didn’t do this to upset you,” she says.

“Then why did you do it?”

“Because he’s a nice boy who asked for my help.”

Lance chuffs out a sharp, disbelieving noise. “A _nice boy_ who wants to run my business into the ground.”

Estela’s lips fix into a rueful grin. She tells him, “I don’t think that’s what he wants, niño.” 

“How would you know?” he grumbles bitterly, shoulders slumping. “Oh, right. Almost forgot. Guess you two are, like, _besties_ now or whatever.”

“Well, I know for certain that he doesn’t want to be at war with you,” she says.

“He should’ve thought of that _before_ he stormed in on my coffee empire.” Lance gives her a pointed look. “Which, by the way, is technically _your_ coffee empire, so I dunno how you’re being so chill —”

“Niño, let me tell you this,” Estela begins speaking over him, firm, just like the way she squeezes his hand, urging him into silence. Lance, yet again, obeys. “If I had only ever been worried about being the best, then I would’ve given up a long time ago.”

His face turns away at once, hiding from the final strokes of daylight painting over them. “Easy for you to say,” he murmurs. “You _were_ the best, Lita. You’re the one who took the café and made it into something special. Into something… extraordinary.” He stares down at his hand, limp and resigned against hers. “Is it really so crazy to want that, too?”

She tucks a finger beneath his chin and lifts. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” 

“Yeah, well,” says Lance, his mouth falling into a lopsided grin, “I kinda have some massive shoes to fill.”

“Your shoes are just fine,” she promises, placing a kiss on the top of his head, and Lance ducks down a bit to let her. 

* * *

As Lance’s car putters noisily down the familiar bend of 3rd Avenue, he notices that there’s a mob of people already gathered outside the bar. Young, trendy, metropolitan-looking folk. An entire breed of obnoxious East Village stereotypes, eagerly awaiting the clock to strike nine, for Luxite to open its doors. Lance seethes at the sight, his chest twisting like a corkscrew. That same blazing pinprick of outrage that’s been plaguing him since yesterday.

The very next thing he notices is a figure up ahead, all jet-black hair and polished chrome.

“What in the — hey, no!” Lance smacks his hand down on the horn at the same time his heel hits the breaks, which sends the whole car lurching to such an abrupt stop that the tires screech in protest. “No, no, no, no, _no_. What. Just — no. _Hell_ no —”

Because right there, right in front of the café, Keith is dismounting his bike where it’s tucked neatly into the last remaining spot along the curb, and doesn’t even seem to react to the unnecessarily prolonged honk blaring from behind. He turns, unalarmed, with a look of genuine bemusement tugging his lips into a frown.

By the time they lock eyes, Lance has already cranked his window down, leaning out of it as far as his seatbelt will allow. “Hey, _buddy_, go park your crummy little Hot Wheels toy someplace else,” he hollers. “You’re in _my spot_.”

“It’s street parking, Lance,” says Keith, in a tone that is very clearly meant to make Lance feel foolish. “First come, first serve.”

“I park here _every single morning_, for your _goddamn_ information.”

“Then get here earlier next time.”

Lance wrenches out a vicious scoff. “Move!” he shouts. 

“No?” says Keith, his frown deepening. “There’re other spots. Literally around the block. With no meters.” 

“Then why don’t _you_ go grab one, if you think they’re so great!” 

“Because I’m already here!” 

“Ugh!” Lance shouts again, throwing himself back into his seat. “Fine!”

With an aggressive yank on the gear shift, he swerves the car backwards, toward the yellow-painted strip of curb, pulling in crooked right behind a grey Prius. Keys are jerked from the ignition, his seatbelt snaps back into place, and Lance comes clambering out the door, nose hoisted high as if in triumph. He doesn’t even give his shoddy parking job a second glance as he doggedly trudges onto the sidewalk.

Keith watches the entire ordeal, emotionlessly, and then finally comments, “You know that’s a loading zone, right?”

“I _am_ loading,” Lance sneers at once, just to be contrary, and when Keith’s brow starts to twitch with something like skepticism, he clarifies, “Myself. Out of my car. To go to work. What are you, some kinda part-time traffic officer now, too? _Get off my back_.”

He hurries up the stoop to the café — which is distinctly _not_ surrounded by enthusiastic customers — making sure to slam the door behind him. Just for emphasis.

And then everything starts escalating from there.

It’s subtle, at first. Lance’s curt dismissals whenever they cross paths before work, the way he passive-aggressively pounds his fist against their adjoining wall whenever the music and disorderly clamor from next door grows too loud and rattles the café windows. He even continues to park in the loading zone, parking tickets be damned, because he needs Keith to know that he will not, and _cannot_, be deterred by him. 

Meanwhile, Lance braces himself for something retaliatory. Diabolical, even. The points keep tallying up in his favor, and, soon enough, Keith is bound to strike back. 

Except he _doesn’t_.

Which is an absolute paradox for about a million different reasons; mainly how it goes against everything Lance knows about Keith as a person. He’s witnessed, firsthand, the roof getting blown off Keith’s temper over things far more insignificant. The curl of his lip, the twinkle in his eye that was always there when he used to challenge Lance’s flirty, halfhearted attempts at being a nuisance, just for the hell of it. But now, Lance is lucky to spot even the slightest flicker of fire, the most fleeting of snarls, and it takes all the gratification out of seeking revenge, if he’s being honest.

So he starts being a little _less_ subtle.

Lance spends his lunch break at the bar that following Monday, and struts around from table to table, offering discounted drink coupons to anyone who stops by the café during Luxite’s brunch hours. A rather unscrupulous tactic, true, but Lance is catty enough to admit that the way Keith had gone all wild-eyed, fuming like a boiling volcano right before he threw Lance out the door had been entirely worth the effort.

Because, really, all Lance wants is a glimpse of it. Some kind of proof that Keith is just as afflicted as Lance is, that it’s killing him just as softly. He wants to _see_ it. Wants it to show up on Keith’s face, as unsightly as a blemish, so Lance can revel in it.

The closest he comes to finding what he’s looking for is when Keith unexpectedly stomps into the café one morning. He stands in the doorway, tall and statuesque, eyes scanning the empty room until they land on his desired target. “Lance,” he says through tight lips, voice descending to a gravelly octave.

Peeking up from the countertop he’d been cleaning, Lance’s expression takes a noticeable shift. “_Kogane_.”

“Got a minute?”

“Tons, actually,” Lance answers flippantly. “Better question is _do you_. Shouldn’t you be busy prepping the brunch shift or, I dunno, brewing up some lukewarm battery acid for your little fanclub of caffeinated cronies?”

“I was,” says Keith, “but then I saw that someone taped _this_ to our front door.”

In a few agile strides, he meets Lance at the counter and holds out a sheet of loose-leaf paper that has the words _‘CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE’_ hastily scrawled in blue ink. Lance makes a show of leaning forward to inspect it, tapping his chin in scrutiny.

“Huh,” he remarks at last, faux-innocently. “Y’know, maybe if you stopped blasting your music so loud you might keep away the riff-raff —” 

And Keith goes, “I know it was you, Lance.”

“You,” Lance flings back, “can’t prove any —”

“This is your handwriting,” says Keith.

“Yeah, so what!” Lance tries not to sputter. “You came over here just to shame me for some _alleged_ crime, then?”

Keith, having set the paper onto the counter, folds his arms over his chest and doesn’t falter. “Actually, I came for coffee.”

Lance laughs, mean and incredulous. “Go drink your own coffee.” 

“Yours is better,” Keith says sternly.

“_I know!”_ cries Lance, and, with that, he pivots snappily on his heel and begins scrubbing the other side of the counter, violently, until his arm burns from the exertion of it. There’s silence, save for the wet squeak of his rag on the marble. Lance keeps his head down. End of discussion.

Or it _would_ be, he thinks resentfully, if Keith’s laser-like gaze weren't still drilling a hole through his back with all its stupid, stubborn, _sparkly_ luster. 

Not that Lance cares, anyway. He’s just making some objective observations here. 

“Really?” Keith pipes up after another beat of silence rolls by, slow and awkward. “Really, Lance?”

Lance continues to scrub with vigor.

“You’re seriously refusing to serve me.” 

_Scrub, scrub, scrub._

“So you’re not — _wow_, okay.” 

_Scrub, scrub, scrub, scrub._

“You’re not even gonna acknowledge —” An ugly noise scratches its way out of Keith’s throat. “— _fine_.”

That’s when Lance hears shuffling, some clattering and banging, which is suspicious enough to have him whirling around again, just in time to watch Keith — _the utter bastard_ — vaulting himself clear over the counter, and knocking down several containers of artificial sweetener in the process.

Lance squawks, aghast, “Wha — What do you think you’re doing?!” 

“Oh, so you _can_ see me,” spits Keith. “What a relief.”

“Yeah, I see you, alright. I see you trying to put your grubby little fingerless-gloved hands all over my shiny new espresso machine like some kinda —”

Keith’s grubby little hands promptly go all over the shiny new espresso machine, and Lance squawks again, arms flailing, eyes bulging. “Get away!” he demands.

“Wouldn’t want to trouble you with actually doing your job, Lance, so I’ll just do it myself.”

“No, you most _definitely_ will not, you — you can’t just —”

Shrugging something nonchalant, Keith ponders over the array of buttons decorating the front of the machine with profound contemplation. “Pretty sure I can.”

“_Don’t_, or else I’ll — I’m gonna —” Lance flounders for an undignified handful of seconds. “— call security on your sorry ass.”

Keith casts him a sideways glance, looking infuriatingly unthreatened as he says, “This is a coffee shop, Lance, you don’t have security.” 

“Quit calling me that!” blurts Lance.

“What, your name?” Keith asks, annoyed.

“Yeah,” and Lance’s cheeks flush an embarrassed red. “Quit — saying it so much.”

“What the hell am I supposed to call you, then?”

For one quick spark of a moment, their eyes stay snagged together, and the weight of that stare plummets in Lance’s gut, swift and soundless to the hollowed bottom. And if he weren’t gripping the edge of the counter for dear life, it’d bring him to his knees, he swears, because it makes him feel weak and wanting in all the worst ways.

_You used to call me so many lovely things_, croons a dangerous part of his mind. Soft things, tender things, that used to be whispered, prayer-like, against shared pillowcases and warm moonlit skin on those dewy summer evenings. Things that used to cut Lance open, and run him dry, and pulse between the press of starving, kiss-bitten lips: _my love, my life, my world —_

Then, aloud, he wails: “Code red! Hunk, I repeat, this is not a drill!”

All of a sudden, the kitchen door swings open to reveal a very startled Hunk with two plastic jugs clutched to his heaving chest. The buzz of the electric mixer is still humming from inside the kitchen, and there’s a bit of cream-colored batter smeared across his chin. 

“Sorry, Lance, I keep forgetting,” he pants, lifting the jugs illustratively. “Is that the one that means we’re out of soy milk?”

“It’s the one that means we have a _societal menace_ —” Lance points an accusing finger in Keith’s direction. “— trespassing in our place of business.” 

Hunk’s eyes go ping-ponging back and forth between the pair until they settle, ultimately, on the menace in question. His shoulders deflate significantly. “Oh. Hey, man.” 

“Hey, Hunk,” replies Keith. “How’ve you been?”

Lance balks, scandalized. “Don’t fraternize with my employees while they’re on the clock!”

“How about I take care of that drink for you, yeah?” Hunk offers, carrying the soy milk over to the espresso machine and calmly escorting Keith around the counter.

“That’d be great,” says Keith.

“So what’re you having today?”

_One regular cappuccino with soy milk, light foam_, Lance’s idiotic brain recites like an awful compulsion.

Keith leans casually against the counter’s edge, humoring Hunk with some menial pleasantries while the drink is prepared. Lance, in the meantime, starts reassembling the sweetener display that Keith so carelessly destroyed with his frustratingly insubordinate stunt earlier, and forces himself not to listen in on their idle chattering. Because he doesn’t care. Not at all.

Hunk snaps a lid onto the drink, and hands it to Keith, who hisses in discomfort as the first sip of scalding liquid burns his tongue. _You’re so dumb_, Lance wants to snicker almost as much as he wants to grab Keith’s face and soothe the pain away with a gentle kiss.

Lance does neither of these things. 

“Thanks, Hunk,” says Keith.

“Sure, dude, anytime,” Hunk tells him, but then an icy glare from Lance has him backpeddling fast. “I mean, uh, y’know… within reason.” 

Keith goes still and quiet so suddenly he looks like he’s been freeze-framed. “Right,” he mutters darkly, and heads for the exit, coffee in hand, lingering just long enough at the door to call out across the shop, “Glad we can be mature about this, Lance.” 

The door slams shut so fiercely that the tiny bell screams overhead, topples off its hook and onto the floor with a depressing clang. 

Then, very slowly, Hunk swivels his attention over to Lance, brow taut, examining him the way a mother might scold their disobedient child. Lance shudders a little bit.

“Buddy, you know I hate to say it, but —”

“Not a single word from you.”

“— I never thought Keith would ever be the one to bring out the worst in you.” 

Lance hangs his head. He just stands there, saying nothing, and hangs his head low because the last thing he wants is for Hunk to see the pain there, to catch him demonstrating the kind of pathetic heartache he’s still trying to hide from the world, even now.

“I’ll be in the back working on the rest of those puff pasties,” Hunk says, and gives Lance’s shoulder a comforting pat before disappearing in the kitchen. “Let me know if you need anything.” 

Somehow, Lance finds the strength to nod, though doing so aches in his whole body, like a creaky hinge. Because maybe this is how it’s supposed to be now, he thinks dismally. Maybe this is all that’s left of him. Maybe it won’t ever stop hurting. Maybe the chasm has grown too wide, and maybe they’ve both long forgotten all the wonderful and devastating ways they used to love each other; the ways they used to light each other up from the inside-out. And maybe Lance’s worst is showing because he never learned how to be his best without Keith by his side. Or —

With his back against the counter, Lance sinks to the floor, plopping himself down amongst the scattered pile of artificial sweeteners, and lets out a heavy, lung-shattering sigh.

— Or maybe Lance is just the _worst_. 

* * *

**then.**

It’s been a month.

An entire month — of Keith’s laughter, his touch, the taste of his lips, his drowsy smiles in the faded light of morning, the rough, whiskey-rich timbre of his whispers at night — and Lance still can’t put a name to this _thing_ between them. This ambiguous arrangement. This unspoken, undiscussed sort-of-something.

Or, rather, he _won’t_ put a name to it. He knows he _can_. He knows he _definitely_ can, happily so, and therein lies the conflict he’s been conveniently avoiding from the very moment, the very _instant_, it all began. 

It’d probably be simpler, in the grand scheme of things, to just lump Keith in with the rest of Lance’s ill-fated flings, and then call it a day. Because that, at least, is something he can wrap his head around. Lance has taken more than enough laps around the dating pool — in varying degrees of success — to recognize these butterflies in his gut, the adrenaline in his veins, the unbidden desire to hum and skip and shout from the highest rooftops until he’s blue in the face. Every enchanting smile and dizzying kiss that has ever managed to get a death-grip on Lance’s heart always sends him spiraling out in a million directions, and he thought he knew how to navigate it by now. He truly thought he already knew all the different, mind-boggling ways he can lust, and ache, and want someone with every fiber of his being.

Until Keith.

Oh, god, _Keith_.

He came out of nowhere, a renegade sleeper cell, crash-landing into Lance’s orbit the way stars collide: spontaneously, recklessly, _explosively_. With Keith, it’s like someone cranked the volume to full blast. Pumped up the intensity on life’s saturation until it shines in blinding technicolor. Kicked his heart into hyperdrive. Set fire to its kindling, and lit up his entire soul with a single spark of blazing chaos. 

And Lance is burning alive, brilliantly incandescent.

Because if his past romances have all been flickering embers, at best, then Keith —

_— oh, god, Keith —_

He’s a whole fucking inferno, destined to ravage and rage.

Perhaps Lance is more of a glutton for punishment than he originally realized — at least where Keith is concerned, that is. It sadly makes sense, what with Lance being Lance, always leading with his heart and letting the rest follow after, and being downright ridiculous enough to kiss Keith that night in the park, so well and so thoroughly that he felt the stars shudder. And while remedying this situation is easy as keeping his distance, Lance can’t seem to stomach the thought of quitting what they have — complicated though it may be — now that it’s _theirs_. It goes against something vital in his programming, in the way he’s been fundamentally hardwired. 

That’s how Lance decides to justify it, anyway, whenever it comes up.

Hunk, on the other hand, justifies it with the term _soulmates_.

Which is…

Look. Okay. Lance isn’t dumb. Waist-deep in denial, for sure, but _certainly_ not dumb. Secretly, he’s well aware that Hunk perhaps has a point, and that this super-charged magnetism between him and Keith goes far beyond the boundaries of anything Lance has experienced before, ever, with anyone, _period_. He’s well aware of the way Keith looks at him — like he’d tear the whole sky down, pluck stars straight out of the galaxy for Lance — and how it makes all the hair on Lance’s skin stand on end. He feels it down to the sinews of his body, the sheer magnitude of it, coursing like lifeblood, how they click like two halves of an unfinished whole. Inseparable on a molecular level. 

And, well, who is Lance to defy the laws of science? He can already feel the habit forming, like a bruise on his psyche, transforming him into something new and sorely addicted to the happiness that beams behind his eyes whenever Keith is near. Sometimes he feels it when they spend rainy afternoons at The Met. Or take ferry rides to Staten Island. Have drinks at Shiro’s bar. Skate around Keith’s apartment in their socks like they’re twelve years old, tripping and wheezing and snickering all over each other and the hardwood floor. Stop for late-night curly fries at their favorite midtown diner, followed by funfetti cookies at Schmackary’s. And sometimes he feels it when it’s just Keith and his guitar, in the corner of the café, catching Lance’s eye and making him fumble with his cups. 

Other times it’s in the way they bicker — frequently and harmlessly — and Lance will be the first to admit that he enjoys seeing Keith all fired up almost as much as he enjoys being the cause of it. It never seems to take much effort to fan those flames, given how they’ve both been cut from the same cloth in identically headstrong ways. Movie night selections, pizza toppings, who’s footing the dinner bill. Each one becomes a hopelessly insufferable battle that usually ends with them duking it out between the sheets, all their razor-sharp words dulled to blunt edges once they get their mouths on each other.

Although the nature of their relationship may seem pretty obvious, all titles and descriptions remain trapped in a strict grey area. No finite rules that might hinder a clear-cut goodbye when the summer comes to an end. Fragile and intentionally vague, but, at the same time, so doting and intimate that it sometimes feels as though they’re a legitimate couple. Even Lance gets lost in it sometimes, catches himself playing pretend, like when he and Keith are walking Kosmo in the park, shoulders brushing, hands clasped and swinging between their bodies.

Neither he nor Keith bring it up after the fact. Actually, neither of them seem to bring it up at all, for fear that doing so will drag their little fantasy out of the shadows and into the light where everything is harsh and glaring.

Here’s the thing, though: it’s becoming progressively more difficult for Lance to keep pretending like it doesn’t bother him.

But no amount of make-believe or wishful thinking can undo the fabric of reality. It’s been a month, and soon it’ll be two, then three. The leaves will brown, and the city will grow cold, and Lance, walking this perilous tightrope between everything they are and aren’t, will inevitably fall to his doom.

But here’s another thing: 

Lance is already falling.

He’s falling in love with Keith, head-over-heels, and it’s only a matter of time before he hits the ground. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does it feel like we're climbing the first big hill of a rollercoaster or what? jhgfhgfhsf Like I keep saying, dots will start connecting more and more as we go along. The next chapter is really gonna answer some questions, I'm sure. Love you all, and I hope you'll stay tuned!! 
> 
> @ceciledraws drew some art of Lance in his "ugliest clothes" from the first chapter, go check it out [HERE](https://ceciledraws.tumblr.com/post/189167842882/started-reading-starlightments-new-fic-syrup)!  
@cosmic-canvas drew the boys being all smitten, go check it out [HERE](https://cosmic-canvas.tumblr.com/post/189144331335/syrup-and-honey-by-starlightments-star)!  
@magicath808 drew a scene of the boys with some GUT-WRENCHING T-SWIFT LYRICS, go check it out [HERE](https://magicath808.tumblr.com/post/188822989395/to-nobodys-surprise-syrup-honey-by)!
> 
> [FIC PLAYLIST](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0CROuZs0SFw5RSegp8oaFD?si=wav9e2tFTN2K0HlW9kKSWg)
> 
> [TUMBLR](http://starlightments.tumblr.com/)  
[TWITTER](https://twitter.com/starlightment)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not gonna lie, I'm lowkey embarrassed about how long it took me to finish this chapter. I know I don't HAVE to apologize, but I'm sorry anyway. I appreciate you all for sticking with me :) 
> 
> Tiny bit of a warning: there is some nsfw-ish content near the beginning and towards the end. It should be pretty obvious when it's about to happen. Nothing is super explicit, but I like to err on the side of caution with that sort of thing.

**. . .**

**then.**

The McClain family’s annual Fourth of July barbecue is a roaring success from beginning to end, all blistering summer sun and powder-blue skies. Steaming, heaping piles of carne asada, hamburgers, grilled corn. Bickering from Lance’s brothers, gossiping from his sisters, the twins chasing each other around the yard with plastic squirt guns. Hunk and Shay bearing armfuls of treats and flaky pastries, so mouthwateringly divine that Estela spends most of the day badgering them for recipes. And then the look on Keith’s face, the positively heart-tugging joy that radiates off him in waves as he introduces Shiro and Adam to Lance’s parents for the first time.

Lance remembers watching them, all of them, admiring what a ragtag portrait they make, and how Keith’s little family blends so nicely with his own, filling all the fissures he never even knew needed to be filled until now. He remembers feeling bubbly in his chest. Happy, and lightheaded, and maybe just a tiny bit sloshed thanks to Rachel’s homemade sangria. 

He does not, however, remember much of the next hour — something about a giggly subway ride back to Manhattan, Keith slumped across an entire row of seats, wheezing with laughter while Lance spins and shimmies around the metal poles like a wobbly showgirl. More giggling, more wobbling, more leaning on each other as they zig-zag down 3rd Avenue at a blundering pace.

And there’s also an enveloping warmth in the air, similar to that of Keith’s arm being slung around him, his lips pressing a quick, uncoordinated kiss to Lance’s temple. It’s a new kind of high he’s never known before and, in a brief rush of clarity, he tries to imagine it through a stranger’s eyes: himself, tall and floppy, in a patriotically tie-dyed tank top that’s been lopped off right above his navel, and then Keith managing to look handsome, if not slightly cross-eyed. Just the two of them — this silly, loose, bright-eyed version of themselves — in this moment, without a care in the world to keep them from falling.

Keith is burying yet another laugh into the curls at Lance’s nape by the time Lance is fumbling the door open, and they toddle together into the darkened café, and then into a nearby wall, tripping over each other’s feet as they go. Keith’s breath is warm, and he smells like booze and firewood and a distinctly Keith smell that turns Lance to mush, and his hands splay immodestly over Lance’s exposed abdomen when he crowds up behind him at the edge of a table. 

“You,” he says, snickering, “are so drunk.”

Lance gives him a scoff and a swift jab of his elbow. “You’d be flat on your ass right now if you weren’t using _me_ as a human life raft.”

“S’not true,” Keith slurs petulantly.

“Let go and see what happens, then. Unless you don’t think you can bear to part with my irresistible bod.”

Keith inhales sharp, readying himself to protest. He hiccups, instead.

“Alrighty, champ, let’s get you some water, huh?” says Lance, and then he’s waddling toward the sink as best he can with Keith still glued to his back. “Lots and lots of water.”

Most of it ends up on Keith’s shoes and his chin, but the rest gets guzzled down in record time. Keith sets the glass onto the counter and then ogles at it for a beat, eyes widening, looking as though he’s apparently very confused about where he is, or how he got here in general. 

“Wait. Lance. What’re we doing here?”

Lance resurfaces from the mini fridge with a large mixing bowl in hand, peels the plastic wrap off the top, and hoists it high like a grand-prize trophy. “Dessert,” he answers. “Duh.” 

“Frosting,” Keith says dubiously. “We came all the way uptown for some frosting.”

“_Some frosting_,” Lance parrots, mock-scandalized, as he climbs onto the countertop, sitting with the bowl cradled fondly in his arms. “You don’t even _know_ this frosting, dude. _This_ frosting is Lita’s top-secret recipe and hands down the best thing that’s ever been inside my mouth.” He flashes a shit-eating grin. “No offense.”

Keith splutters out a cough, some water spewing past his lips.

“Seriously, though, this stuff’s legit,” says Lance. “Other frostings quake in fear. Like, if a radioactive dairy cow and the Pillsbury Doughboy made sweet, sweet love together and then had a delicious little buttercream baby, it still wouldn’t be half as good as _this frosting_.”

“What the hell is wrong with you,” Keith wonders, softly. 

“I’m having a religious experience over here, leave me alone.”

“You plan on sharing?”

“Hm.” Lance pretends to think about it for approximately two seconds. “Probably not,” he declares primly, scooping some frosting out of the bowl with his finger and popping it into his mouth.

Silent and wolf-like, Keith prowls closer until he’s nestled between Lance’s legs at the counter’s edge. He peers up, leveling a scowl at Lance’s mouth, curled artfully into a taunt, and then he lunges. But his fingernails barely scratch the side of the bowl before Lance jerks it away, just out of reach.

“Oh-_ho_, not so fast there, Broody Brows,” he sings, dunking his finger into the creamy mixture again, wagging it in front of Keith’s nose. “What’s the magic word —” 

Another lunge; only, this time, Lance doesn’t see it coming when Keith manages to capture his wrist in a vise-grip. He goes boneless at once, staring with a dizzying sort of fixation as Keith slowly parts his lips around Lance’s frosting-tipped finger and sucks. His tongue, all bold and hot and slippery-soft, laps away in long, lazy strokes. Combined with his tousled mane, how he looks at Lance from under the sweep of his eyelashes, and how sweat trickles down his neck to pool in the dip of his clavicle, glinting there like glass — it makes what has got to be the most absurd but also probably the most _erotic_ tableau Lance has ever witnessed in real life. His whole brain disintegrates right then and there. 

Keith retracts, his eyes hooded, and the finger slides out slick and shiny with spit.

Lance visibly gulps. “Hoo boy…”

“Yeah,” agrees Keith, swiping at the bowl that now rests precariously in Lance’s lap. “Stuff’s legit.” 

Lance’s face lights up a vivid red. “Okay,” he says, sounding both amazed and frustrated. “That was pretty smooth, you bastard. I’ll give you that one. But only ‘cause I’m still kinda drunk right now, and also ‘cause of your mouth, which, speaking of, you’re gonna have to get on mine, like, _pronto_.” 

Keith stares, raising a frosting-covered finger as if to indicate. “What about dessert?” 

“Oh my god,” Lance says after a short pause. “You’re being serious, aren’t you. You really just — _Keith_. M’dude. My main man.” Steadying himself with hands on Keith’s shoulders, with ankles hooked around his middle, Lance pitches forward so that their foreheads are nearly flush. He sighs, “You can’t leave me hanging like that.”

And before he can lean in the rest of the way, Keith reaches for him, using the firm tip of his finger to slather leftover frosting all over Lance’s mouth in an unexpectedly intimate manner — the slow, sensual drag of it — coating every inch, every delicate bow and curve, with a generous layer of the stuff.

“Like this?” asks Keith, and then pulls Lance in, kissing him thoroughly.

The whole thing isn’t nearly as disgusting as it probably should be — despite the squishiness and sliminess and sloppiness — because all Lance can taste is that heady blend of liquor and vanilla when Keith forces their lips apart and growls into it, sending ripples through Lance, outward and upward, like a shockwave. Like a sweet sugar-rush trilling high in his veins.

Their mouths keep sliding hilariously off-center at each new angle, bringing out all sorts of wet squelches that have Lance giggling into the kiss, giddy, spreading an even bigger, goopier mess up to their noses and down to their chins. He feels burnt up and crazy, all clacking teeth and fevered breath, but Keith doesn’t shrink away from it; he gives back just as fierce, kissing Lance like he’s a challenge that needs to be met.

He nibbles and nips along Lance’s jawline, smearing a creamy trail in his wake. Then lower, mouthing at the column of his neck, his frenzied pulse, his jutting clavicle until it purples beneath Keith’s tongue, and then, _oh god_, and then: he crouches even lower, spurred on by the strangled noise that comes from somewhere deep within Lance’s chest, and licks a smudge of sugary residue off Lance’s navel with a single, sinful flick. 

“Fuck,” Lance croaks, only semi-aware of how wrecked he sounds, of the hair curling and clinging to his forehead, of his skull thunking back against the cabinets, his hips lifting infinitesimally while Keith finds the clasp of his jeans, the zipper, the waistband of his boxers. Keith yanks everything down in one go, freeing him, and when Lance steals a peek, tracking every move like a bloodthirsty hound, he hears himself murmuring an even more impassioned, “_Fuck_.” 

Because Keith is a vision, a breathtaking masterpiece, artistically debauched under pearly beams of light that stream in from the windows as he spreads Lance’s trembling knees a bit wider and places a sticky, buttercream-flavored kiss to his inner thigh. Lance keens softly. His head spins. The temperature skyrockets, suddenly and outrageously hot, _way too hot_, and he feels it in the black of Keith’s gaze like smoldering coal, enough fervor there to set the whole galaxy on fire.

After that, Lance only has a fleeting instant to blink the fuzziness out of his eyes before Keith is swallowing him down.

He already doubts he’s going to last as long as he’d like to, but the real misfortune is that he can’t even chalk it up to the alcohol anymore. He’s always been this weak for Keith, he realizes half-deliriously; the guy’s a brand of hard liquor all his own. And, right now, he’s also damp-skinned and disheveled and working Lance so good until he’s babbling utter nonsense like _yeah_ and _baby_, and grabbing Keith’s hair at the root.

It doesn’t exactly bring Lance to the brink so much as it catapults him straight over it, and he comes seconds later, hips bucking, stars exploding.

There’s a moment, after Keith finishes coaxing tiny shivers out of Lance with his hand alone, of them looking at each other, locked, both panting hard and rosy-cheeked. Keith is the first to break into a grin, a small dollop of frosting still stuck to one side of his mouth where a dimple should be. His tongue pokes out to lick it away. 

“Holy shit,” Lance rasps, with heat and awe, and then somehow musters enough strength to haul Keith up by the front of his wrinkled shirt. “_C’mere_.”

* * *

Afterwards, when they’ve finished devouring the rest of the frosting and each other, they stretch out on the stoop together, all languid, and listen to the faraway _boom-snap-fizzle_ of fireworks echo through the city. Lance is resting with his back to Keith’s chest, feeling it when Keith breathes; when the colorful explosions vibrate behind his ribs like a jumpstart to Lance’s slow-beating heart.

He tips his head all the way back until he’s looking at Keith upside-down, eyes traveling the length of his throat. Lance lifts his hands toward him, makes it as far as Keith’s cheeks before he gets lost there, letting his fingertips graze over the peaks of them. His skin is tacky and warm to the touch.

“Hey.”

Keith looks down at him, pulling Lance in like gravity, giving him his gaze and a partly crooked smile. His hair is a disaster, wrestled free of its elastic now and spilling out around his face; Keith, with starlight in his eyes and a bruise on his neck that Lance put there with his own hungry lips, features backlit by a neon sky.

And there’s also this: Lance, buoyant, mesmerized by the glow of him, and so unbearably in love. 

“Hey,” he says again, whispers it with wonder, “wanna know something? This has been the best summer of my whole life.”

For a moment, Keith almost looks upset, brow quivering like he isn’t sure what to do with it. He covers one of Lance’s hands with his own and holds it against his face, sighing very slightly into the skin of Lance’s inner wrist. Then he’s leaving a kiss there, light as a flower petal. It’s the most gentle Lance has ever seen him. 

“It’s not over yet,” he whispers back, and he’s right. It isn’t. Not yet, not right now, and not even tomorrow when Lance wakes up in Keith’s bed, in Keith’s arms, still feeling, somehow, as if the universe has shifted on its axis.

* * *

**now.**

“Are you _sure_ you don’t need me there this weekend?” 

Lance breathes a massive sigh, sparing no amount of melodrama, to ensure that Hunk will be able to sense his annoyance through the phone receiver. Of course Hunk is worried about him; that seems to be the theme, lately. And while there’s a fundamental part of Lance that relishes in all this attention, the worrying, after a while, starts swerving a little too close to _babying_. 

“Hunk,” he chides.

“I know, I know,” says Hunk. “But like, are you? Sure? ‘Cause Montauk’s not that far from the city, so if you needed me, for anything — and I mean _anything_ — I could be back there in just a couple hours —” 

“Quit checking up on me, dude,” Lance sighs again, untying his apron one-handed. “Everything’s just as fine as it was the last time you called. And the bajillion times before that, too. Go enjoy your sappy little lover’s getaway, booze it up on the beach, and make sure you tell Shay that after giving it some thought I’ve decided to forgive her for whisking away my favorite pastry chef without my consent.” 

“I’m sure she’ll be relieved,” Hunk snorts, though it sounds like he’s smiling. 

“Besides,” Lance adds grimly, “it’s not like you’re missing much over here, anyway.”

“Still slow?”

“Pretty sure I served a grand total of four customers today, and one of them only wanted water. For their _dog_.”

Hunk makes a low, commiserating noise, which Lance chooses not to react to. With the countertops polished and the lights switched off for the evening, he exits the café and locks the door behind him. The city is dark and glistening, damp streets reflecting the golden warmth of streetlamps as the clouds open up to a gentle drizzle, so Lance holds his bag over his head and hoofs it to his car.

“I bet business’ll pick up soon,” he hears Hunk saying, his optimism unmistakable over the sound of pattering rain. 

“Right,” grumbles Lance. “Remember when you said that two whole weeks ago?”

“Ah, c’mon, Lance. Have some faith. Just because things aren’t real great right now doesn’t mean it’s always gonna be —”

“_Shit on a stick!”_

“Well, I mean,” says Hunk. “That’s maybe a little bit dramatic.”

“No, no, it’s — ugh! _God_,” Lance cries, and kicks resentfully at the bumper of his car where it’s parked along the sidewalk because, right here, clipped to his windshield, there’s a handwritten parking ticket. And right _there_, fastened securely to his back wheel, is a bright yellow clamp. “My car got friggin’ _booted_.”

“Lance!” Hunk gasps. “Did I or did I not warn you about parking in that loading zone!”

Lance’s entire face twists with chagrin. “You might’ve mentioned it once or twice.”

“Many times, Lance! Many!”

“Alright, fine,” he relents. “It’s not a huge deal.”

Hunk clicks his tongue and says, “It will be if you don’t pay off all your tickets.”

“Yeah, so,” Lance ventures, chewing his lip, “funny story about that, actually.”

But Hunk doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t even breathe a single word for a longer-than-average delay, and just as Lance is beginning to suspect his phone might’ve dropped the call, his receiver crackles with a deep, staticky inhale, followed by Hunk’s no-nonsense tone: “That’s it,” he says. “That is _it_. I’m sending you some money, and you are going to use it for those parking tickets. No excuses, young man.”

“Don’t,” says Lance.

“I’m hanging up on you now,” Hunk informs him curtly. 

“Dude, _seriously_,” Lance wails into the speaker. “You better not!”

“Love you, buddy. Check your Venmo. Goodnight.” 

The line goes dead, and Lance tears the phone away from his ear to stare at it, mouth agape. Rain beats down onto the blank screen, drops growing steadily fatter until it’s coming in thick sheets, seeping through Lance’s clothes and soaking him from head to toe in a matter of seconds. The symbolism, unfortunately, isn’t lost on him. It practically howls in his ear. And it sounds an awful lot like Hunk's knowing drawl. 

Lance braces his hands on the hood of his car and lowers his head in defeat, letting the water spill down the contours of his face. He could very well take the subway back home, except the trains only run local at this hour. There’s always a taxi, of course, which seems the most time-efficient and appealing, in theory, until Lance remembers the eighty dollar parking ticket still balled in his fist — not to mention the other five he’s been diligently ignoring all week, stashed away in his glove compartment out of shame.

Option three, he supposes, involves plopping himself down right here on the wet, filthy city sidewalk and waiting for this godforsaken flood to wash him down the nearest storm drain like sewage water.

It’s then that he’s met with his fourth and final option: a lone headlight approaching from behind, shining dull in the gloom. 

“Hey,” says his savior. “Need a lift?”

Peering up through his rain-coated lashes, Lance finds Keith idling next to the curb; not quite the savior he’d been envisioning, but looking aggravatingly heroic, nonetheless, atop his chromed motorcycle, wearing a drenched black t-shirt that clings downright obscenely to the outline of his abs.

Lance, very pointedly, scowls at them as well as the rest of Keith’s physical presence.

“Nope,” he answers vehemently, turning his nose up and away. “I’m peachy. I’m just _aces_ over here, man.”

“You sure?” asks Keith, and Lance doesn’t even have to follow Keith’s gaze to know that it’s narrowed condescendingly at the yellow boot on his wheel.

“More than sure,” Lance barks at him. “Now move it along, rubberneck, nothing to see here.” 

With that, he whips himself around and stomps off through the puddles, picking up the pace when he notices Keith appear in the corner of his vision. He’s rolling slow down the street, engine purring like a lazy house cat, to fall in line with Lance’s gait.

“You’re not walking in this,” Keith tells him; _commands_ it, even, as if he has any goddamn right to be giving out orders. Lance ignores him and trudges on.

“Oh, you bet I am,” he snarks, arms wound tight around his shivering frame. “Might even get mugged in an alley or catch pneumonia along the way, make it a _real_ fun time.”

“Just get on the bike, Lance.”

“You seriously wanna drive me all the way to _Brooklyn_ in the middle of a friggin’ typhoon?”

“No,” says Keith. Then, after a beat: “You can stay the night at my place.”

Lance lets out a scathing guffaw. “Pneumonia it is!”

“Fine,” Keith hisses through his teeth, revving his engine, water frothing up beneath the rumble of his wheels as he readies to speed away. “Go for it, then.”

“—_Wait!”_

The engine settles again. Keith just waits there, in the pouring rain, while Lance stares back at him, sopping and demoralized, blinking the water from his eyes as streams of it dribble down his cheeks, his neck, the slope of his spine. Lance deigns to give the bike another disparaging once-over, his slipping gaze like a punch to his own pride only _worse_ because Keith actually looks a bit slighted by the callous rebuff, and yet he’s _still_ here. He isn’t moving. He isn’t leaving Lance behind, even though he already has plenty of reasons to.

Lance drags a hand through the front of his hair and tugs. The curls stick up ridiculously like chicken feathers. 

“Okay. So. First off —” And then, finally, he’s clambering onto the seat, scooting as far back as humanly possible. “—I’d just like to take a moment to point out that this is all _your_ fault. In case you were wondering.”

“Thanks for clearing that up,” Keith replies dryly. 

“And secondly, the only reason I’m doing this is because I’m, y’know… _wet_. And cold. And don’t have any other way to —” 

“Just hold onto me so we can go already,” says Keith.

Lance crosses his arms, huffing, being difficult on purpose. “Not happening.”

“You’re gonna fall off if you don’t.” 

Lance gets his mouth only partway around a pithy retort before Keith is suddenly releasing the clutch in a show of rebellious demonstration; just enough to send the bike jolting for a split second. Behind him, Lance explodes with an unmanly shriek as he wobbles, and then lurches forward until his nose is smooshed between Keith’s shoulder blades, grip crushing and startled around his waist.

The storm roars around them as they zip off down the street, but Lance swears he can hear a quiet reverb, the subtle rise and fall of Keith’s back that suggests amusement. He stabs his stubby nails into the skin at Keith’s flank, which, much to Lance’s absolute frustration, only seems to make the noise double in volume. 

* * *

Excited paws come galloping into the room as soon as they enter the apartment. Kosmo makes a beeline for Keith first, who greets him with a pat between the ears and a soft _hey, boy_ before toeing off his boots. Then Lance kneels down to take his turn, and just when he has the dog writhing around in pure bliss under his hands, Keith returns, towering over the pair with a folded towel in hand. It isn’t until he offers it that Lance realizes he’s dripping profusely all over Keith’s floor.

“Oh,” he says, a bit thrown. “Thanks?”

“I’m gonna go change,” Keith tells him. He stalls on his way to the bedroom, then pivots on his heel. “Make yourself, uh. Comfortable.”

“_Right_. Super comfortable. Don’t mind me, then, I’ll just be… _here_,” Lance mutters, mostly under his breath, and plops down onto the futon as Keith vanishes out of sight. “…’Cause this totally isn’t freaky at all.” 

He sits there with bouncing knees and fidgety fingers for all of five whole seconds before allowing his gaze to roam. Cautiously. Keith’s place isn’t an exact carbon-copy of what Lance remembers, per se, but it’s similar enough that it sends chills up and down his body, like a phantom breeze tickling his skin. 

Except it’s not actually anything paranormal that’s haunting him; more like memories. Faded and worn and living in the floorboards, in the chips in the plaster ceiling. The air vents hum a familiar tune and the walls are just as bare as they were a year ago. Barer, even, without any records stacked against them. In fact, Keith’s record player, his guitar, his sheet music, his scribbled up notebooks with pages of unfinished songs — it’s all, for whatever reason, unaccounted for.

The mood shifts just then, hitting Lance like a flubbed landing, like when the ground knocks the air clean out of his windpipe. He veers sharply to his left, then right, then does a complete 180-turn on the futon, to be extra sure he hasn’t skipped over something. His eyes are busy scouring the south-facing wall, every last indiscernible corner and crevice, when they snag on the bedroom door where it seems to’ve drifted open on its hinge.

It forms the tiniest gap, no more than a minuscule little margin, barely enough space to make any difference at all, but — _but!_ — if Lance leans forward ever so slightly, lining up the angle just right, he can see through to the other side: a piecemeal glimpse of muscle, rippling like a wave beneath bare flesh. A sliver of bicep, of sturdy shoulder blade, slowly coming into view as Lance leans another inch and then discovers the starkness of Keith’s hand, leading Lance’s gaze down, down, _down_ to a loosened belt buckle and —

And Lance leans maybe a little _too_ far, tumbling right off the futon and onto the floor with a tremendous thud. 

Kosmo gives a gleeful yip that sounds suspiciously like laughter as Lance, all red-faced and mortified, his heart hammering reprimands in his chest, prays for the sweet release of death.

_Okay_, he thinks. Okay, yes, a simple lapse in sanity. A moment of weakness. Look, he doesn’t need to justify himself, okay, he’s human. _Whatever_. 

Then, from behind the bedroom door, Keith calls out, “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Lance calls back too quickly, sounding anything but. “Everything’s fine.”

Keith reappears in a fresh change of clothes, hair roughly towel-dry and wrangled into a haphazard knot. He spends a curious moment eyeing Lance where the boy in question is still belly-down on the hardwood, then briefly shakes his head like he’s thinking better of asking and makes for the kitchen.

“Want something to drink?” he offers.

“Um, sure,” says Lance, pushing himself to his knees. “Whaddya got?”

“Water? Red Bull?” Keith pauses. “Coffee?”

“Got anything a little… y’know, stronger?” 

Lance doesn’t hear a reply, but he does detect some rustling. He gets up and steps into the kitchen doorway, lingering a wary distance away from Keith, who is pulling two glasses and a large handle of Fireball Whiskey from the cabinet. Lance takes one look at that nauseatingly recognizable bottle, and, despite himself, fills the silence with a groan.

“Oh, man,” he mutters, grimacing, “that stuff almost killed me.”

The hard line of Keith’s mouth falters, just a tentative little tremor. Something close enough to a smirk that it nearly looks natural. “You almost killed yourself,” he says as he pours. “I told you it was spicy, and you _still_ took the shot.”

“Choice words coming from the guy who gets all watery-eyed over a few squirts of _tabasco sauce_,” huffs Lance. “How was I supposed to know it’d feel like a demon was trying to claw out of my throat?”

Keith snorts and hands him a glass. “Remember afterwards when you dragged us across the street to that sketchy bodega because you thought milk would help the burn?”

“And then Carlos the sketchy bodega guy kicked us out ‘cause _you_ threatened to bash his nose in for cussing me out in Spanish.”

“He kicked us out because _you_ were chugging milk straight from the gallon in the middle of his store, Lance.”

“Yeah, yeah, _details_.” Lance flips a dismissive hand. “Pretty sure we’re both still banned for life, anyway.”

That’s when Keith laughs, brightly and also a little rusty like maybe he hasn’t made that sound in a while, and it takes Lance wholly by surprise. He just stands there dumbly, blinking at Keith in the pale kitchen light until he notices for the first time that his hair is a few inches longer than it used to be. There’s some faint stubble clinging to his jaw, and bags under his eyes, and those same two dimples on his cheeks, and Lance suddenly can’t tell whether he’s looking at a total stranger or the boy he loved last summer.

At this point, he wonders which one would be worse.

Somewhere between their second and third drink they wind up outside, on the fire escape, overlooking a maze of high-rises and shimmering concrete. Ice rattles around in their glasses. Raindrops drip off the metal railing, a steady _plunk-plunk_ to mimic the pulse in Lance’s ears. His focus narrows to their knees and how close they are to touching, and it reminds him of all the other countless times they used to sit out on this very ledge, beneath a swirling sunset, cotton-candy skies, or a blanket of stars, sharing kisses and whispering secrets into the night like they were fearless.

Replaying those memories is like pressing rewind on someone else’s life, someone else’s reality, even though his skin itches the same way it did back then. The tips of his fingers are warm and prickly. And he thinks of every promise, every moonstruck forever he’s ever sealed to Keith’s lips, and almost reaches for him. 

Then Keith clears his throat, an unpleasant guttural sound.

Lance glances up at him expectantly, but Keith has averted his gaze, glaring down at his drink like it’s wronged him on a very personal level. After a few more seconds pass, Lance finally prompts, “Uh, you good over there?”

“I just —” Keith mumbles at long last. “—I wanna say something.”

“Okay,” says Lance. He waits. He fusses with the fraying hem of his pant leg. He waits some more. “So are you gonna, like, say it?”

Keith’s face pinches up as though he’s getting a tooth pulled. “I’m trying,” he grits out.

“Well, don’t hurt yourself, dude.”

“Look,” Keith begins, already exasperated, “I know this whole… _thing_ between us has been weird —”

“Understatement of the century, but sure, why not. Let’s go with that.” Lance moves his glass around in a big, swoopy circle and declares in his best, most deadpan announcer voice: “You heard it here first, folks. Breaking news update. Someone alert the media.”

“Goddammit, Lance, can you just — _I’m trying to apologize_.”

Floored, Lance perks up, trusses himself a little taller as an undeniable _something_ buzzes to life inside him; something deep-seated and mildly triumphant. “_Oh_,” he says archly, drawing out the vowel to such a dramatic extent that he can practically hear Keith rolling his eyes. “What for, huh?”

“For the last few weeks,” says Keith. “I didn’t mean to — well. I shouldn’t have overstepped your boundaries.” 

It comes out sounding artificial in the gruff tone of his voice; some pragmatic line that Shiro undoubtedly had to spoon-feed him on repeat until it was memorized, Lance reckons with a smug twist of his mouth.

“So,” Keith concludes, attention returning to the contents of his drink. He twirls the glass once, aimless, watered-down whiskey sloshing about. “That’s it. That’s what I wanted to say.”

Lance sniffs haughtily. “Thought you wanted to apologize.”

“I just did.”

“Did you _really_, though?”

“Lance.”

“All I’m saying is that it might help if you grovel a little bit, just throwing it out there —”

“I’m _sorry_, okay?” Keith bursts, like a cable snapping. “There. Are you done now? I’m sorry for getting in your way, and I’m sorry for not realizing how much you _clearly_ still hate me.”

“I don’t hate you, Keith,” Lance flings at him, words unwinding faster than a runaway spool. It takes everything in him not to dwell on how long that confession has been sitting there, ripe on his tongue, trapped behind his clenched teeth. He shakes away the thought, and says, “It’d probably be way easier if I did, trust me, but — I _don’t_.”

“Sure doesn’t seem that way,” Keith grumbles, and Lance raises his eyebrows. “You wouldn’t even talk to me, Lance, not unless it was for one of your weird little revenge stunts.”

“Well, love to break it to you, buddy-o, but if you really wanted to talk to me so bad, you had almost a whole year to do it, and I don’t remember _you_ ever picking up the phone, so yeah, excuse the _fuck_ outta me for not giving you the sort of warm welcome you were expecting.”

A terrible pause follows, one where Lance can see, in horrendously slow-motion, every shift of Keith’s jaw and the noiseless hitch in his throat, how his face goes so lifeless and cold that it makes Lance’s skin pebble. Keith turns away again, stares out at the yawning stretch of horizon before them.

“Alright,” is all he says.

Lance glowers at his profile. “I’m not wrong.”

“I didn’t say you were,” Keith replies shortly. “I said alright.”

“Yeah, I heard that,” hisses Lance. “And, for the record, saying it twice doesn’t make it any less cryptic or annoying.”

Keith sighs, the scrape of it like running a palm over gravel, and it catches Lance on the way down, crumbling over what had once been a satisfying little tickle in his belly. Now it throbs, a repulsive downbeat, muddled by visions of Keith’s crestfallen face on all those mornings he came in for coffee last week, and the gentle but disappointed cadence of Hunk’s words from the other day, still ringing like a death knell. Lance takes a swig, hoping that another mouthful will wash the awfulness out of his system for good.

“Hunk thinks you’re bringing out the worst in me, y’know,” comes out, suddenly.

Neither of them speak for a long moment after that. Keith, his expression unchanged and unreadable, asks quietly, “Am I?”

Lance’s chest flares a little. “Doesn’t matter,” he forces out, sidestepping the question. He swallows around that bitter aftertaste until his lips feel loose with it; his head scrambled, his insides sick and syrupy. “What matters is that I’m letting you. I keep letting you get to me. Every time I think I’m finally past all this, I just keep circling back again.”

He’s never said these things out loud before and, frankly, he doesn’t understand why he’s choosing right now, of all times, to spiral. But he does know this: saying it is like tipping a cup full of water, overspilling, oversharing, even as it makes him feel pathetic and vulnerable in an ugly way and backed into a corner with no way out but through.

“And honestly? It _sucks_, okay, like… it sucks being a dick to you all the time, and it sucks feeling like — like no matter how hard I try, I’m never gonna get any better. Like I’m just gonna be stuck this way forever.”

“What about school?” Keith asks him.

Lance flinches, a knee-jerk reaction. “What about it?”

“That’s the whole reason you decided to go, isn’t it?” says Keith, sounding impressively neutral. “To be better. To find… whatever it is you were always so convinced you needed to look for.” 

“Yeah, well, guess the joke’s on me, then,” Lance says. “Maybe I might’ve actually wound up finding it if I hadn’t dropped out.”

He puts it out there, practically throws it down between them and grinds it into the dirt with the sole of his sneaker and waits for Keith to do something with it. Dares him to. “I,” Keith tries, with audible apprehension. “I didn’t know you —”

“What, flunked? Epically tanked?” scoffs Lance. “Yep, that sure is a thing I did, alright.”

They wane into another silence. Keith taps a finger against his glass, on and off, a staccato tempo that Lance rightly assumes to be driven by discomfort. “None of that means anything,” he decides to say, like he’s trying to be reassuring but missing by a mile. “You know it doesn’t.”

A laugh bubbles up in Lance’s throat, strained and sudden. “Oh, it means _everything_, actually, ’cause then I had to deal with my family — my friggin’ _family_, by the way, who’ve never even come _close_ to failing at _anything_ in their entire lives — and I had to see my parents’ faces when I told them why I’m not going back next semester.” He pauses for breath, drawing his knees into his chest. “It’s like… they didn’t even know what to _do_ with me, so they just sent me to some shrink and gave me a whole bunch of meds I don’t even bother taking half the time, which is — great, just _great_. And, y’know, the only person who doesn’t still treat me like I’m _broken_ is Lita and, big surprise, turns out I’m screwing that up, too. I was supposed to come back here and make her proud and prove to everyone that I _am_ good enough at something, but… but now the café is pretty much balls-deep in debt, and I — I don’t know what I’m gonna do if I can’t fix it.”

He realizes he’s trembling a little afterwards, so he puts the glass to his mouth and chugs down whatever’s left until he isn’t anymore. His eyes automatically flit over to Keith, who’s watching him like he’s got one foot dangling over a land mine, and it makes Lance want to climb off this damn fire escape or maybe out of his own skin.

“Anyway,” he deflects, peeling his gaze away again. “So what’s _your_ excuse, then, rockstar? ‘Cause last time I checked, big-shots like yourself don’t usually take breaks from their budding music careers to go make minimum wage at their brother’s bar.”

For a while, Keith just keeps staring at him. “Um,” he says, then blinks, recovering, voice dropping when he finally admits, “I quit doing that, actually.”

“Doing what?”

Keith gestures at nothing, odd and inarticulate. “That.”

“...Yeah, sorry, still not following.”

So Keith admits again: “I’m not really doing the music thing anymore.”

Lance rushes to set his glass down, out of the way, with a resounding clink. “You — wait, _what?”_ His eyes are bulging, his brain is fizzing like a faulty fuse. “Wait, wait, wait — the fuck does _that_ mean, the music thing? As in, your favorite thing in the entire world? You’re just… not doing it anymore, like, ever, _at all?”_

“Yes,” Keith says defensively, and before Lance can let that answer sink in, he’s demanding, “What do you care, anyway?”

“I _don’t_ care,” snaps Lance, though he can see in the tilt of Keith’s brow that Keith isn’t being fooled. “I mean — I just think that’s the most batshit bonkers thing I’ve ever heard, that’s all.”

“Think whatever you want, Lance, but that doesn’t make it any of your business.”

Lance clenches up, feeling stung by it because he knows it’s true. Because it’s just another glaring reminder of what they used to be and what they aren’t anymore. Because getting over Keith had been like picking glass out of a wound, too shattered and bloody to remove it all at once, and Keith drives those leftover shards straight into Lance’s center, his jaw set as if he’s gearing for a fight he’d rather die than lose; a mirror image of last year, on the day he turned around and left. 

“Jesus,” mutters Lance, his own voice dark and unfamiliar as it drains out of him. “I dunno, man. I just don’t get it… the way you can just walk away from stuff like that, like it’s nothing.” He shakes his head, resigned. “I’ll never get that.” 

“It’s not nothing,” Keith tells him, his fingers stroking, hesitating, against Lance’s like he’s trying not to break whatever fragile, crystalline thing is strung between them. Then, much softer, he says: “You weren’t nothing.”

When Lance braves a look, he catches a second, more deliberate swipe of Keith’s thumb as he traces over veins on the back of Lance’s hand, the knobs of his knuckles. He doesn’t want to think about the warmth of it, or the learned tenderness, or how Keith’s touch still sings to every ounce of him like birdsong, sweet and silvery; a red thread around his hopeless little heart. 

Lance doesn’t want to think and, _oh_, he doesn’t want to pull away. 

He doesn’t pull away.

* * *

**then.**

As much as Lance delights in the rowdy rhythm of their banter — how they tease and jab and get under each other’s skin in all the best ways, for the sheer thrill of rivaling snark for snark — it’s these gentler moments in between that truly unravel him the sweetest.

The apartment windows have been thrown open wide, a rich symphony of sound carried in by the drifting breeze: soft city ambience from four stories below, and an even softer melody from Keith as he sits on the fire escape landing with his guitar, plucking out notes and humming under his breath while Kosmo naps peacefully near his feet in a pool of honeyed sunlight.

Lance smiles a little to himself, overwhelmed by the intimacy of it. Keith looks as bronze and beautiful as a summer dream and, _god_, Lance can’t possibly be more in love with him than he is right now. And it’s becoming harder each day not to say it aloud, not to shout it into the universe, not to confess it devoutly against Keith’s bared throat when they’re tangled up in the sheets and too close to coming undone for it to even matter, anyway, but _this_ — this is plain agony, he thinks, how it festers in his gut. Lance feels like he’s teetering on the brink of something irreversible. Something he can’t even bring himself to fear falling into.

So he rises from the futon, and silently makes his way over.

The long, willowy shape of his shadow swallows Keith up, then goes still, waiting to be acknowledged. But Keith is too absorbed in his strumming to notice; head bent and eyes closed, like the music has him spellbound. Several minutes pass, maybe even more, and Lance is tempted to stand here all day just to marvel at him — this sun-bright picture of a boy who once confided in Lance about how he often struggles with expressing his feelings; how music helps him do just that — and he might’ve, too, if not for the prickling sense of urgency spurring him into a crouch.

In one careful motion, he’s tugging the guitar out of Keith’s grasp and setting it aside, strings clashing with such a sudden, discordant twang that Kosmo jolts awake and scampers back into the apartment. Keith’s head snaps up instantly, blatantly bewildered as he watches Lance lower into his lap, knees bracketing Keith’s hips.

“What are you —”

Lance promptly silences him with a slow, amorous kiss. He braces one hand on Keith’s shoulder, the other brushing along the sharp curve of his jaw, and when they finally part, Keith is blinking at him woozily, lips pink and perfectly slack. 

“I’m gonna ask you something,” Lance says, taking Keith’s chin and tipping it skyward. “And it’s super important, so keep those pretty eyes up here for me.”

Keith nods, looking sufficiently intoxicated.

“What am I to you?”

“Impossible,” Keith answers.

Lance’s mouth twitches delicately. “Shut your whole entire face, you smart-ass,” he says. “I mean, like… when you talk about me to Shiro, or Adam, or anyone else. What am I?”

“You’re mine,” Keith answers again. He doesn’t even hesitate. His hands flatten against the small of Lance’s back, pulling him in, almost possessive. “And I’m yours.” 

“For how long?” asks Lance.

And Keith goes, “As long as you want.”

Lance grimaces so hard that one eye squints shut. “Okay, but what if I want a long time?” he whines, a frantic sort of energy ballooning inside him until he’s sore with it. “A really, _really_ long time, Keith.”

There’s a pause as that sinks in. Keith’s face softens considerably, unfurling with revelation, and his hands tense up where they’re still snug around Lance’s middle. He looks slightly astonished, as though Lance has been made ethereal before his very eyes, a fallen angel limned in gold, and he murmurs, voice thin like it’s trying not to break, “You said you weren’t looking for anything serious.”

“Yeah, I know, and I meant it,” says Lance. “But then I found you.”

Keith’s chest gives a small, incredulous heave.

“God, _you_,” spills helplessly from Lance’s mouth as he lays a palm to Keith’s cheek and caresses. “You’re amazing. You’re so — _ugh_. You just had to come along with your stupid guitar and your stupid coffee order, when I was least expecting it, and just… _ruin_ me, like, you’re ruining _everything_, Keith, y’know that?”

“If it makes you feel any better, it’s not like I saw you coming, either,” Keith reveals, and then tilts subconsciously into the touch, all but liquifies beneath it like he’s never felt anything more pleasurable. Fondly, he muses, “That mouthy know-it-all from the coffee shop.”

“You like when I get _mouthy_ on you, baby, and we both know it.”

Keith snorts at him. “You’re impossible,” he reiterates.

“Yeah,” chirps Lance, puffed up and outright beaming now, “tell me more.”

Predictably, compulsively, Keith takes the bait. His hands start moving first, rucking up the back of Lance’s shirt to map out lazy patterns all over the skin beneath. Up the knots of his spine, smoothing between broad shoulder blades, then down again, skimming the bend of his waist and dipping into the back pockets of his jeans. Lance miraculously does not choke on his own tongue. 

“And you’re a real pain in the ass,” says Keith, smirking. He ducks into Lance’s neck, nosing at the sensitive spot behind his ear. “Handsome, too. _Loud_. And you can be kind of an idiot, sometimes.” 

Lance’s head lolls sideways to allow Keith better access. “A-And?” he rasps.

“And I think you’re the love of my life.”

Those words, the fullness and sureness of them, eventually land on Lance, taking him aback. He pulls away to find Keith’s eyes inches from his own, lit up with silent yearning; like he’s drowning and Lance is that first gasping breath waiting for him at the surface. 

“You —” Lance tries to speak, voice too shaky. “—_fuck_,” and then he’s kissing Keith’s willing mouth, crashing into him, inevitably. He digs into the base of Keith’s skull, brow deeply furrowed, fingers restless as they grapple and knead. The fire-filled pressure of it seems to waken something wild in Keith because he’s gripping Lance even tighter, dragging him in where they’re already pressed impossibly close, and Lance knows — he just _knows_ — that he’ll never be able to come back from this, now that he’s here. He’ll never stop wanting Keith’s name on his lips, his hand in his hand. He doesn’t think his heart will ever beat the same way again. He doesn’t think he ever wants it to. 

“We’re crazy,” he says, parting a few centimeters, if that, to whisper it into Keith’s mouth. “Like… this is crazy, right?” 

“Probably,” replies Keith, winded.

“Think it’d be even crazier if I told you I love you back?” He captures Keith’s face anew, thumbing at the corner of his half-curled lips. “‘Cause I do, Keith, I love you, I love you back. And I have no clue how this is gonna work, how any of this is supposed to go after I leave, but — holy shit, _I love you_, and I’m not ready for this to be over. I want serious, I want the real thing — I mean — this already _feels_ like the real thing, to me, but I want —”

“I’ll come with you,” Keith says all of a sudden.

A beat. “To Boston?” Lance balks. “But what about you? What about all your gigs and stuff?”

“Boston has gigs,” insists Keith. “Somewhere. I’ll find them.”

Lance searches his gaze for a second, struck by the unflinching resolve he uncovers there. “You mean it?” 

“If we’re really doing this,” Keith tells him, hushed, “like, the boyfriend thing, then —”

“Wait, wait, hold on,” Lance interrupts, hands flapping. He tries to bite back a pleased little snicker, but fails. “Say that again.”

Keith quirks a puzzled brow, and mumbles, “Uh. Boyfriend?” 

“_Ugh_,” Lance groans, growing flustered, his whole face blotchy and red with it. “Where do you get off making everything sound so much _sexier_ than it needs to be, huh? Like, be honest, do you practice this stuff in the mirror? Is it just a regular part of your hot guy morning routine or something?”

“Lance,” says Keith, and Lance shuts up at once, practically vibrating on top of him. Catching on, Keith repeats it slower this time: “You’re my boyfriend.”

Lance makes a noise like he’s dying. “Oh my god.”

“My boyfriend.”

“Okay, okay — jeez! You can stop now!” 

But the slant of Keith’s smirk — all upturned and charmingly askew — says he wouldn’t dream of it. So when Lance begins squirming in defiance, Keith doesn’t even think twice about pinning him flat to the metal landing, caging Lance in and bearing down from above with his grinning face, the light blurry around him like a halo. Lance wiggles side to side, but his whole body has gone slack, heaving with laughter, and by then Keith already has a solid hold on his hips.

“Wow,” Lance says after finding enough breath, his lungs aching with euphoria. “My boyfriend.” 

“My love,” amends Keith.

Reaching, Lance loops his arms around Keith’s neck and pulls him down until their mouths are poised on the verge of a kiss. “My life,” he retaliates.

In this moment, he’s so full to the brim with sunshine and happiness that he swears Keith must be able to taste it on his lips when they finally come together. It must be sparkling under his skin, glowing across the apples of his cheeks. The swell of Keith’s ribcage pressed warmly against his own is the only thing, Lance thinks, keeping him from soaring past the clouds and beyond.

“_My world_.”

* * *

**now.**

Lance wakes up keenly aware of the agonizing crick in his neck.

It takes a moment for the pain to dull, for everything to adjust around the current situation: he’s sprawled out and drooling on Keith’s rickety old futon, a threadbare afghan bound up around his ankles, and it’s quiet save for the usual morning ruckus of Midtown pouring in from the window they left open overnight. Lance groggily props himself up. His eyes are thrumming inside his skull, sore from squinting into the daylight where their forgotten drink glasses are still sitting on the fire escape landing.

And his hand still feels warm and tingly from letting Keith hold it last night.

_It’s not nothing. _

_You weren’t nothing. _

All at once, Lance reels back as if he’s been slapped, and then shoots upright, scrabbling for his things a bit rabidly. He can’t seem to reconcile all these mixed emotions pinging around his brain — probably because he’s yet to process any of them, and doesn’t exactly intend to anytime soon — besides the one telling him to get the hell out of here before Keith emerges from the bedroom, maybe wearing his softest sweats, looking sleepy-faced and rumpled and a little bit grumpy, and Lance’s heart might do something really dumb like — _hurt_. Which would be _bad_. 

At the door, something tugs on the leg of his jeans. A nudge, a forlorn whine, followed by a pair of beady blue eyes and a drooping tail. Lance relents, figuring he ought to spare at least one proper farewell. So he squats down, allowing Kosmo some time to slobber all over his face.

“Take good care of him, okay, boy?”

Kosmo just blinks at him, tail twitching.

Lance huffs a sigh at his own expense. “Yeah, you’re right,” he mutters. “That came out weird.”

With a final ruffle of fur, Lance turns away and bolts out the door, descending the stairs two at a time until he’s weaving through city streets along with the other morning commuters. Rounding the corner and ducking into the nearest subway station. Gone. Out of sight, out of mind.

Except not quite, because Lance spends the whole rest of his day _definitely_ thinking about it.

In his defense, though, he really tries not to. He opens the shop, chugs down three shots of espresso, and cleans everything within reach. He organizes his paperwork into three neat piles on the office desk, then re-organizes them into two more. He stocks the fridge and changes out the coffee filters and pumps up the music in his earbuds as loud as it’ll go.

But just beneath the surface, there’s the reminder of Keith tangling their fingers together, his face touched by moonlight and his voice soft as silk, and it feels — _nice?_ For, like, a second? Feels like something uncoiling; that large, gnarled knot in Lance’s chest where his heart has gone a little bit sour.

It’s getting late and Lance is onto his fifth espresso shot of the day when the bell above the door cries out its merry tune.

“Sorry,” says Lance, turning toward the sound, “but we just closed up for the — _oh_, uh. Shiro. Hey.” 

And standing there by the doorway, quite unexpectedly, is Shiro. He holds himself with the air of a proper executive, all clean-cut and classy in a crisp button-down, hands tucked easily into the pockets of his best slacks. His gaze flits from floor to ceiling, like he’s sizing the place up for a moment, and then finally toggles over to Lance.

“Good timing,” he says, ambling closer to the counter. “I was hoping I’d catch you before you took off.”

Lance’s mouth freezes partway open, caught in surprise. “Me?”

Shiro chuckles at him, albeit politely, and answers, “Yeah, you. If you have some time, that is.”

“Um,” drawls Lance, wavering over to the espresso machine, reaching for a cup off the top of the stack. His eyes slice a glance back at Shiro, who is smiling handsomely, and the longer it sits there, fixed on his lips, the more Lance wants to poke it. “Sure? I mean, yeah, I guess I can whip up one last drink for you.” 

“I’m not interested in buying a drink,” Shiro tells him. “Actually, Lance, I’m interested in buying your business.”

The cup slips right out of Lance’s grasp and clatters noisily to the floor. He stares at Shiro for a minute while his brain digests this information.

And then for another minute.

Shiro, meanwhile, bites back a wince. “Er — sorry,” he sighs. “I should probably explain myself first.” 

“Yeah,” Lance blurts out, shoulders jerking aggressively with the sound, his face stricken and pale. “Yeah, uh-huh, you should probably go ahead and _do that_.” 

From his messenger bag, Shiro removes a very intimidating packet of papers, at least a dozen sheets thick by the look of it. He smooths it out onto the counter and just the first page alone is littered with so much entrepreneurial jargon and terms and conditions that it almost makes Lance dizzy. 

“See,” explains Shiro, tone practiced and professional, “the bar’s current location isn’t big enough for the kind of customer traffic we’ve been getting lately, especially since we’ve expanded to brunch hours. Our goal is to keep that trajectory going while still maintaining our nighttime crowds. That’s where you come in.” He chances a small grin before proceeding, “I’d like to buy this place and reformat it into Luxite’s new-and-improved café. Coffee, pastries, the works. And the fact that you’re already right next door makes this merge all the more ideal.”

Is Lance expected to agree with him, just like that? _Nothing about this is even close to ideal_, he wants to say, but his tongue feels like rubber, so Lance continues flipping through the hefty contract in silence, scanning endless blocks of text until he finds the dotted line where he’s meant to sign his name. His fingertips pass over it slowly, painfully.

“I’d take good care of it, Lance.” Shiro’s expression subdues into something gentler, then, as he promises, “You have my word.”

Lance eventually conjures up the power to respond, his jaw stiff. “Look, your pitch is impressive and everything, but… this place is way more than just a piece of real estate, y’know, it’s… it’s —”

“I understand, Lance, really. But you won’t have to worry about ever losing your spot here. When we open, we’ll be needing someone who knows as much about coffee as you do, so you’ll still have a job, if you want it. Not to mention, considering how much this place is worth, you’ll be able to pay off all your debt even sooner than expected.”

“My debt,” Lance echoes flatly. “What makes you think I need to worry about that?”

“Well, when Keith brought it up he said —”

“This was _Keith’s_ idea?”

The air in the room goes a little too warm, a little too tense with the realization that washes over both their faces simultaneously. Lance, not fully gobsmacked but getting there. And then Shiro, looking caught, like a child getting his wrist slapped away from the cookie jar. He opens his mouth to speak, but Lance cuts him off, words rising like bile. 

“The café’s not for sale, Shiro,” he gets out in a rush. “Sorry, but — but _no_. I’m not gonna sell it.” 

Shiro regards him with something akin to both shock and sympathy. He nods solemnly, and then nudges the contract a bit closer to Lance.

“Just think about it.”

He leaves, as swift as he had entered, plunging Lance back into the harrowing silence of an empty coffee shop.

It’s the sadder, more lonesome moments like this when he can still see a hazy semblance of what this place used to be: a _home_. A cozy little sanctuary filled with joy and bustle and all of Lance’s favorite, most treasured memories. Lance, at age six, barely tall enough to swipe treats off the cooling rack when nobody was looking. At thirteen, making his very first macchiato and proudly flaunting the burn scars on his wrist the next morning. Then three years later, helping Lita close up after his first official shift, both of them sweeping and laughing and sing-shouting to the radio at the top of their lungs. 

And Lance has been clinging to these memories for so long, clutching at them with all his might, thinking or maybe just praying that if he can bring that magic back, somehow, then he won’t feel like such a disgrace. He’ll finally have something extraordinary to call his own. 

But then — _Keith_.

Because of course it’s Keith, of course it is, of course he’s dashing all of Lance’s hopes the same way he broke his heart last year, and of course Lance almost fell for it all over again, like a total fool.

_Of course._

Lance storms out the back door as soon as he feels the unforgivable prickle behind his eyes, the throbbing twinge in his throat that threatens to strangle him. He paces fitful circles around the alleyway outside and sucks in his breath, furious with himself, furious with Keith, furious with —

“Did you come out here to cry, too?” someone sniffles.

He hardly even recognizes the hunched figure hidden away in the shadows until he creeps a bit closer. There, next to the bar’s half-open kitchen door, sitting on the ground with her back against a metal dumpster, is Romelle. She’s looking over at Lance, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy.

Lance frowns in return. “I’m not crying,” he mumbles, ignoring the obvious crack in his voice.

Romelle simply presents a handful of crumpled tissues, and lets Lance take a few as he shuffles over to join her on the pavement. Their mutually miserable silence lingers for about a minute before he starts feeling a little strange about it, considering Lance has never even so much as acknowledged the girl before, aside from an occasional glimpse of her and her fellow bartenders strutting over to that sushi place across the street during their lunch hour. 

“Shouldn’t you be inside with the rest of your little Powerpuff trio?” he asks her.

“I was, but —” she murmurs. “—but I broke another bottle during my shift tonight. Top shelf. My second one this week. It just slipped right out of my hand and… and Keith, he — he _yelled_ at me… and he told me not to bother coming back to work until I was ready to focus.”

“Keith yells at everything,” says Lance. “Don’t take it too personally.”

Still, Romelle’s bottom lip wobbles. “Everyone knows I never would’ve gotten this job if Allura hadn’t put in a good word with Shiro,” she laments, “and the only reason I haven’t been fired yet is because they don’t have anyone else to replace me, but sometimes —” Another pitiful sniffle. “—sometimes I think they’d be better off without me. I’m just not cut out for this job.” 

Lance pauses at that. “They don’t have anyone else, huh?”

She shakes her head no.

He glances at her, sideways, something small and secret to match the grin that plays out on his face just then.

“Lucky for you,” he begins, wrapping an arm around her sagging shoulders in encouragement, “I think I know just the job you _are_ cut out for.”

* * *

**then.**

“Oh my god, _there_ you are!”

Lance turns around and finds himself momentarily blinded by a bright flurry of sparkle that turns out to be Rachel, all dolled up like a glitzy tour de force with her sequined mini dress and plastic tiara. It sits lopsided atop her bushy mane and reads _‘birthday bitch’_ across the front in pink swirly letters, which happens to complement the silken sash draped across Lance’s own festive getup — a blue animal print button-down with distressed black denim.

She breaks through the crowd, hurtling straight toward him in a pair of sky-high stilettos that she barely knows how to handle even when she isn’t four martinis in. Lance manages to grab her around the waist before she can face-plant unattractively onto the bar.

“We’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Rachel screeches, cutting through the live band’s catchy electro-pop cover of _Barracuda _blaring in the background. “Hunk was worried you’d try doing pantless yoga on the tabletops again.” 

“That was _literally_ one time,” Lance huffs moodily. 

“Come on, it’s your birthday!” Rachel gives his limp shoulder a good, rousing shake. “_Our_ birthday! You haven’t even danced with me yet!” 

“Rach, I say this out of love, but I really don’t think anything you’re doing out there counts as dancing.”

She doesn’t appear to hear him, though, the liquor making her too scatterbrained to focus on anything other than the burly, tattooed bartender sauntering by. “Hey, hello, excuse me,” she hollers after him, arms windmilling maniacally. “We need another round of birthday drinks over here please.”

The bartender slides her a wink and two shots of tequila, and Rachel blows him a wet-sounding kiss in response.

“Oh, okay,” says Lance, quirking a brow, “and who is _that_ tall stick of dynamite?” 

“No clue, but I’m thinking we’ll have a spring wedding,” she replies offhandedly, “which you definitely won’t be invited to if you’re gonna keep being such a buzzkill.”

“I’m not being a buzzkill.” Lance shoots another despairing glance across the club. Nothing but a mob of blurry, faceless, undulating bodies as far as the eye can see. Irritably, he grumbles, “I’m being _stood-up_.”

Rachel gawks at him. “What do you mean?” 

“I mean we’ve been here for hours and that mullet-headed moron I call my boyfriend is still a no-show.”

“Maybe he got tied up at work,” Rachel supplies helpfully. “Or maybe the subway broke down and he’s stranded underground without cell service.”

“Yeah, maybe,” says Lance, frowning into his untouched shot glass. “I was just kinda hoping that he’d wanna… I dunno, like —” 

Then, as if on cue, the band reaches the end of their song. But instead of plowing straight through to the next one like they’ve been doing all night, there’s an inexplicable lull and a bit of shuffling on stage. Most everyone in the crowd responds with an uproar of impatient murmurs, while some of the drunker audience members boo and heckle at the disruption. Lance is paying them no mind, contemplating how many _‘where are you?!?!’_ texts he can send before he starts sounding gross and clingy, when a voice curls around his ear, low and husky and amplified through a shrill screech of microphone feedback. 

“Um,” it says. “Hi.”

Lance immediately whirls in his seat. Instinct, magnetism — whatever it’s called, it doesn’t matter right now because over there, center stage, bathed dramatically beneath the glaring spotlight, is a tall, dark, strappingly-built shape of a guy that can only be Keith. He’s got a tight grip on the neck of his guitar, eyes combing through the crowd; restless.

Lance’s heart palpitates. Once, twice, three times.

“So, I don’t usually do this sort of thing, but —” Keith admits. “—there’s this guy I’ve been seeing, and today’s his birthday.”

The room reanimates, tittering with intrigue and an occasional wolf-whistle, and Lance can faintly sense at least a dozen new heads turned in the direction of him and his ridiculous sash. Next to him, Rachel is repeatedly swatting his shoulder, beside herself with excitement. Lance hardly even notices that, either.

“Problem is,” says Keith, breathing a small chuckle into the mic, “I’m not great with gifts and he’s… he deserves something special.” His voice gets quieter, but still ricochets off the walls, filling the space. “I don’t think he even knows what he does to me half the time. Or how much better he makes my life just by being in it. I guess I don’t always say it enough, but — I want him to know, so I wrote him a song. And, uh… here it is.” 

He looks uncomfortable — in this subtle, under-the-surface sort of way — only because Lance knows him. Only because Lance has seen him at the café and how he closes his eyes when he plays, making the audience go invisible; how he shrugs off compliments and never engages or entertains his listeners with anything even remotely personal. The boy’s a natural talent, sure, but not much of a showman.

Which is why Lance truly can’t believe what he’s witnessing when Keith strums the opening chord and nods to the band, prompting them to join. Keith never shares his own material, not like this. They both know that.

So what the hell is he doing?

It’s softer and more tender than the zingy, upbeat anthems that everyone’s been jumping around to all night long. The crowd is captivated by him, regardless, but no one as much as Lance, whose heart screams raucously under his ribs after only the first few notes. He watches Keith relax as soon as his mouth touches the mic, easing into it, like he’s slipping back into his own skin. He’s in his element now. He’s _unreal_.

By the chorus, everyone in the room has their cell phone raised high in solidarity; a giant wave of glowing screens, all swaying to the same beat. Lance would join in if he weren’t already stumbling away from the bar, threading his way through the throng until he’s close enough to feel the stage lights warming his face. Close enough to see the sweat dotting Keith’s brow and the sheen of his lips as he wets them between lyrics. Close enough that when Keith’s lids flutter open Lance is the first thing he sees, and the smile that comes over him sings to something in Lance’s soul. Impulse. Magnetism. _Love_.

The song ends, drifts into the air like a plume of smoke, and the crowd cheers for it. Claps their hands and whoops and wails for it. Keith swings his guitar onto his back, rushes to the front of the stage and crouches before Lance, dewy and flushed, with this strange, wild light blazing behind his eyes like a supernova. It’s a good look on him. 

“Happy birthday, love,” he says, beaming, and Lance kisses him, over and over, until he can’t hear the noise anymore.

* * *

Outside, Lance hails Rachel a taxi, and he lets her cling to him, arching up onto the balls of her bare feet to smack a kiss against his cheek that leaves behind a big smear of lipstick and glitter. 

“He’s a keeper, y’know,” she tells him, drunkenly, waving her stilettos around like pom-poms, before tumbling into the backseat of the car.

“I know,” says Lance, because he does. He really does.

Then he wipes at his cheek and watches her go, and when he turns back around he notices Keith loitering in an alcove near the club’s entrance. The man standing there with him has an unfriendly face and a three-piece suit, and he casts an enormous shadow over Keith as they have what seems to be a private conversation. Keith says something, pitched low. The man says something back, shakes Keith’s hand, and then lumbers off down the dimly lit street. 

Lance hurries over as soon as the coast is clear. “What was that all about?” he asks. 

“Hm?” hums Keith, swinging his guitar case onto his back.

“That guy,” Lance says, and nods toward the man in question’s retreating frame. “He kinda looked like he was either gonna invite you to join his underground drug cartel or offer to do your taxes. Couldn’t tell which, but they both seem like pretty risky moves, in my opinion.”

Something twitches in Keith’s shoulder, like an aborted shrug. “Uh,” he says, taking Lance’s hand and starting in the opposite direction. “His name’s Kolivan, apparently. He was at the club tonight, and he said he really liked the song —”

“_Yeah_, ‘cause it was _awesome_.”

“—so he gave me his card. That’s it.”

“Wait, for real?” Lance crows. “What kinda card? Lemme see.”

He plucks it from Keith’s grasp, ignoring the dissatisfied huff it earns him when he does so, and holds it to eye level. _‘A&R Executive, Blade Records’_ the card states in glossy black lettering.

Lance brakes to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk, jerking Keith back with him where they’re still attached at the hand. “Holy friggin’ _cheese_.” He’s staring at the card with rapt attention now, expression frozen in shock. “Blade Records? _The_ Blade Records?”

“Guess so,” mumbles Keith.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me, dude! They’re, like, ultra famous. They’re a _household name_. They’re —”

“In LA,” Keith concludes for him, abrupt, as he snatches the card back. “They’re based in LA.” 

“Well,” Lance blinks, “_yeah_.” 

Keith takes off without another word, huffing some more, leaving Lance with little else to do but dawdle a few paces behind and wonder, adamantly, what exactly he seems to be missing. He thinks about the Keith he knows; the one who sings to half-empty coffee shops and scribbles half-finished lyrics onto cocktail napkins or the back of his palm, and stays out until ungodly hours of the night just to play a fill-in gig at some scrappy music joint for a measly paycheck. Then he compares it to the Keith he saw tonight, who stood up on that stage like he was born to be there, like he was invincible under those colored lights. 

It’s the same guy in front of him right now, murder-marching his way toward the 23rd Street subway station, with the mother of all golden opportunities literally at his fingertips, and Lance — 

He just cannot fathom passing up something that _extraordinary_.

“So when are you gonna call this Kolivan guy back?” he asks when they’ve just about reached the mouth of the station.

“I’m not.”

“You’re _what?”_

“What aren’t you getting here, Lance?” erupts Keith, wheeling around angrily, stopping Lance dead in his tracks again. “He lives in LA. I don’t. End of story.” 

“You’re telling me you’re just gonna pretend this never happened, then? Seriously?” Lance says, tone climbing. “Keith, this is the sort of thing people spend their whole lives _dreaming_ about, and you just got it handed to you outside some club. I mean, you might never get another shot, and you sure as hell won’t get one in _Boston_ —”

At that, Keith almost bares his teeth, like a warning. He gives Lance a flash of his gaze, all flint and fire, and growls, “I don’t wanna fight about this.”

Lance throws his hands up. “Neither do I!” 

“Then stop _fighting_ with me.”

They board their train in silence. They find a pair of seats near the front in silence. Keith slides in toward the window and keeps his gaze angled out that way, too, even as he brings a hand down on Lance’s leg, like a wordless peace offering, like a soothing reminder to cushion the blow. Because for all their stubbornness and quick-fire tempers to match, they’ve never been very good at staying mad at each other.

Lance doesn’t look over at him either, not fully, but, in the outskirts of his sightline, he does notice Keith stealing one last lingering glance at Kolivan’s card before stuffing it back into his pocket.

“Keith,” he says at last, quiet, “you gotta call him.”

“Lance.”

“No, okay? I’m not letting you run from this.” There’s conviction when he speaks this time, his voice less distant, less like water in his ears. “That’s just a thing that isn’t gonna happen,” he goes on, and then, after a moment, he thinks to add a heartfelt, “I _forbid_ it.” 

Keith finally stirs to life. His fingers twitch, then flex tightly around Lance’s denim-clad knee as if to ground himself as he mutters, “You know what that would mean, right?” 

“‘Course I do,” answers Lance. “Means you’d be as far from me as geographically possible without falling right into the ocean.”

Keith’s hand gives another small spasm, signaling an obvious dislike for the idea.

“But y’know what else? It also means you wouldn’t have to spend the rest of your life wondering _what if_,” Lance persists, lifting his gaze and turning it toward Keith’s pinched expression. “Think about it, Keith. Every time you go to a sold-out concert, or sing along to your favorite song on the radio, you’d just be saying to yourself: _that could’ve been me_. And I… I don’t wanna be someone who takes that chance away from you.” 

He reaches out, clasping Keith’s hand with his own, enduring the swift pang in his gut that accompanies the gesture. It dawns on him, suddenly and entirely, the realization that he’s terrified of how much it’s going to hurt when he has to let go. 

And Keith seems to share the sentiment, releasing a low, plaintive noise as he exhales. “Lance —”

“I’m gonna stop you right there, babe, ‘cause you’re not allowed to say no to the birthday boy,” Lance interjects, and reaffirms his grip on Keith’s hand. He squeezes, lightly, an attempt to brighten the mood. “It’s against the rules. Practically a crime.”

Keith leans his weight into Lance’s side and sighs against him. “Since when do we follow rules?” he mutters, but doesn’t argue any further.

Lance chuckles. “I love you,” he says, kissing the crown of Keith’s head. “You’re gonna be great.” 

* * *

**now.**

“Angry ex, three ‘o clock,” Hunk forewarns, nerves already trickling into his tone, hands working a mound of pastry dough even quicker as if to combat them. Lance straightens up, and has the glorious satisfaction of watching something black-haired and vaguely feral charging full-speed past the window. He purses his lips to ward off an oncoming grin. _Right on schedule._

Lance races to the door and flings it open at the same time Keith does, both of them skidding to a standstill in the doorway, just inches shy of a collision. Their outraged expressions lock for only a second before Lance is thrusting a finger at the brightly-colored _closed_ sign still taped to the glass. “Can you read?” he sneers. “Or did they not cover that in Neanderthalling 101?”

“Can you _move_?” Keith shoots back.

“Hm, lemme think about that,” says Lance, adopting an exaggeratedly pensive pose. “For, like… at least a couple hours.”

Fed up, Keith muscles past Lance and marches to the center of the room. His gaze swivels around the perimeter like a laser point, passing over Hunk’s frightened gape behind the counter, then circles back to Lance. “Where is she?” he demands at once.

“What, lose something?”

“Where,” roars Keith, “is she, Lance?”

Towards the far side of the café, the kitchen door squeaks open. Romelle is in the middle of wiping her hands on a dish rag, but stops mid-step when she takes in the scene. Panicked, she folds her arms around herself, like maybe she thinks doing so will disguise the brand-new café apron tied around her waist. It’s evident when Keith recognizes it because he looks like he wants to ram his fist into the wall, multiple times, and is just barely shoving the urge somewhere back inside him. 

“Get back to work,” he grunts at her. “We’re swamped today.”

“Romelle,” Lance cuts in sternly, “_stay_.”

“_Now_, Romelle.”

The poor girl just stares between them anxiously, then turns her bewildered eyes on Hunk and asks, “Are they always like this?”

Hunk’s pitying sigh speaks for itself. “Uh, guys?” he begins, then, managing to maintain a sense of authority despite how uneasy he still looks. “If you’re gonna do this now, d’you think maybe you could take it somewhere else so we can open?”

“Don’t worry, Hunk,” Lance grumbles, “We’re done here,” and then he’s slamming his way through the back door, out into the alleyway, with Keith in hot pursuit. 

“I can put up with your theatrics and your bad attitude, Lance,” he hears Keith booming after him as soon as they’re alone, “but _this_ is crossing the line.”

“Took the words right outta my mouth,” says Lance, nasty with each syllable.

“I just can’t believe you’re still wasting your time playing these stupid games.”

At that, Lance stops midway down the narrow path to round on Keith, asphalt scraping underfoot. “Well, _I_ can’t believe you’re a double-crossing piece of shit, and yet _here we are_,” he snaps, pivoting in place only to whirl back around again less than a second later. “Actually, no, I take that back. I _can_ believe it, ‘cause you’ve been messing things up for me since the day I came back here.”

Keith plants his feet, rigid as a war-torn soldier, and scowls. “_I’m_ messing things up?” he argues. “You _stole_ one of my employees, Lance, so now we’re understaffed on a fucking _weekend_ and gonna have to figure out some way to —” 

“Gee, sounds like a real tear-jerker of a situation you got there, pal,” Lance says tartly, nostrils flaring. “Karma sure is a right bitch sometimes, huh?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how Shiro waltzed in here yesterday asking to _buy my business_ because, apparently, _someone_ tipped him off about the café being in trouble.”

The horror that flickers across Keith’s expression sticks in Lance’s sternum like a thorn. Keith blinks once, slow, and doesn’t confirm the accusation, which, Lance suddenly realizes, is a confirmation all the same.

Lance bristles, wounded. “So you seriously thought you could just use my own secrets against me and I wouldn’t find out about it?” he bites out. “Did you mention I’m a drop-out, too? Bet you guys had a big friggin’ laugh over that one.”

“He… He wasn’t supposed to —” Keith begins muttering to himself. He lowers his gaze to the ground, brow crinkled with some sort of inner conflict. “—I told him not to spring it on you like that.”

“I feel like you’re kinda missing the point here,” squawks Lance, “and that point is that you shouldn’t have told him _anything at all!_ Period!”

“And risk closing the café down for good?” Keith snipes back at him, raising his voice. “Look, I know how much this place means to you, and I thought at least, with Shiro, you’d be leaving it in safe hands —”

“Oh, sure, round of applause for Mister Good Samaritan over here.” Lance claps three times in Keith’s direction, loud and sarcastic. “Next time you try overthrowing my business I’ll remember to send you a fruit basket.” 

“I’m not trying to overthrow anything,” Keith growls at him. “I’m just trying to help you.”

“I don’t want any help and I _definitely_ don’t want it if it’s coming from _you_.”

In one breakneck stride, Keith swoops forward into Lance’s space like he means to crowd him against the wall. Lance’s stomach drops, but he otherwise stands firm, thrusting out his chin to emphasize the barely-one-inch of height he still has on Keith. It’s petty, he knows it, and he enjoys every second of it.

“You’re an asshole, Lance,” says Keith, with finality, with venom, with a low, rumbling breath.

“Don’t call _me_ an asshole,” Lance seethes, accenting his anger by bumping Keith’s shoulder with the palm of his hand, “you asshole.” 

Keith’s eyes flash at him, stunned and enraged in equal measure. “_You’re_ the asshole,” he bursts, and bumps Lance right back. 

“No, _you_!” shouts Lance. The force of it batters his lungs and rattles his ribs until everything inside him feels disjointed. “You’re the _king_ of assholes! You’re such an asshole that calling you an asshole is an actual insult to every other asshole in the world! _Asshole_!” 

This time, when Keith dives headlong toward him, gnashing his teeth, Lance really does stumble back against the cold brick and he thinks, for a dark, distorted moment: _yes_. He thinks: _now you get to hurt, too, and see how it feels._ Up close, Keith’s eyes are pure titanium, pupils expanding to hide the wounds buried at the bottom; wounds that Lance bit down on and dug into with his own bare hands. 

Because that’s always been it, hasn’t it? They’ve always been able to push each other’s buttons and tug the wrong stitches, always dancing on the knife-edge between fury and passion. It’s exhilarating. It’s excruciating. And it’s also exactly what Lance has been so ruthlessly searching him for — that bluster, that grit, that impenetrable spark.

_This_, Lance thinks, and hooks a furious fist into the front of Keith’s shirt, every last nerve electrified. _This._

Then he kisses Keith.

He just kisses him, with tongue and vigor. Just wrenches Keith into him like maybe he can smother the void in his chest — some sunken cavity where something warm used to glow — swallowing Keith’s surprised little _mmph_ as it tails off into a moan. The sound of it is almost alien until it burrows into Lance’s bones, and then he’s flaying open; an outpouring of every banged-up, bruised-up feeling he’s ever had for Keith, in one mighty surge. 

Keith’s hand goes to the small of Lance’s back while the other is plunged into his hair, cradling the base of his skull. And he’s kissing back — _god, he’s kissing back_ — like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do, the very last thing he’ll ever take and touch and grab, so he slips a thigh between Lance’s, pressing, grinding, wringing a harsh gasp from Lance that tastes like embers in his mouth.

At the sound of another door being swung open to their left, they jump apart, double-quick. Lance thwacks his head back into the wall, right where Keith has already jerked his hand away, and curses loudly.

“Oh, uh — sorry —” Shiro stammers, stood in the threshold, already recoiling in embarrassment up until the moment he starts absorbing what he’s just stumbled upon. Then he’s coming to a halt, gaping. “_Oh_,” he says again.

Shiro’s watching them both, not frowning, although the disapproval on his face is almost worse. Lance feels violently knocked back into alignment, feels the blood sweeping through him, higher and hotter. Reality returns to him in a wild whoosh of breath.

“I can’t,” he rasps, voice barely there. “I never should’ve —”

A few beats too late, he staggers out of Keith’s arms and to the side, careful so their bodies don’t brush. He doesn’t let himself get a good look at Keith’s eyes as he moves past, but he can imagine them, dark and opaque even in the light.

“Wait,” he hears Keith say at the same time Shiro warns, “Keith.”

Lance sags back against the door when it seals shut behind him, a palm slapped hard over his swollen lips to stop them from burning.

* * *

**then.**

Shiro — since he’s _Shiro_, and always so full of good intention, and surprisingly difficult to say no to when he cranks up the wattage on that gleaming grin of his — wants to host a going away party at the bar, in spite of Keith’s numerous and emphatic insistences that he doesn’t need one and will probably throw some form of a fit if Shiro were to actually go through with it.

So, naturally, Shiro decides to go through with it. 

Although the celebration turns out to be less of a blowout and more like a modest gathering of close acquaintances, Keith still huffs and broods and spends a majority of his evening muttering thinly-veiled threats in his brother’s direction as he’s juggled around the room by an unending cycle of people and praise and well wishes. 

At one end of the bar, Lance nurses the dregs of a lukewarm beer and observes the scene from afar, keeping tabs on Keith’s anguished expression, his jittery hands, how he occasionally peeks around the vicinity in search of the nearest escape route. 

Lance considers jumping to the rescue — considers strolling over there and snaking a protective arm around Keith’s waist and stealing the spotlight with a charming quip that gets everyone laughing while Keith just sways into him and breathes, relieved — when a fresh, frothy pint materializes in front of him. Glancing up, he finds Shiro stationed behind the counter.

“I know this party is supposed to be all about Keith,” says Shiro, “but how are _you_ holding up?”

Lance opens his mouth, closes it, then replies, “Fine. I think.” He stares down at the condensation leaking onto his palm, if only to get Shiro’s rueful look out of his periphery. “I mean — I’m really happy for him. I am.” 

“Yeah,” Shiro agrees. “Me, too.”

A giddy shriek pierces the sound barrier. Both men turn curiously toward the latest commotion, where Keith is being cornered by Shiro’s three bartenders. The blonde one, Romelle, has him trapped in an embrace, and Keith tolerates it with his arms frozen at his sides, eyes cartoonishly round and overwhelmed like he might be trying to communicate his distress telepathically. 

“He’s been working for this since he was just a kid, you know,” Shiro goes on, “but these past few months have been… different. He’s writing more, playing better.” The lines of his face soften, thoughtful. “You bring something out in him, Lance. Something I haven’t seen from him in a long time.”

Lance just shrugs it off. “Keith’s great,” he points out, “with or without me.” 

“What I mean is,” says Shiro, “thank you. For supporting him.”

Now, upon second glance, Romelle appears to be petting Keith’s hair and blubbering in his ear. Keith, to his credit, does not default to panic-mode; just allows one of his hands to creep up and pat her on the back, kindly but awkwardly.

Lance can’t help the endeared smile that crawls onto his lips.

“Always will.”

Back at the apartment, Lance helps Keith pack up the remainder of his belongings. It’s far more upsetting than he ever imagined it would be, having to dismember every last fragment of Keith’s life and shove it out of sight until they’re standing in the middle of this depressing husk of a room, surrounded by nothing but cardboard shipping boxes and the weakest murmur of memories. Empty shelves, barren walls, dust caked into the baseboards and windowpanes. Even Kosmo appears uncharacteristically dreary, all huddled up in the corner with downturned ears.

The bedroom is no better, stripped down and hollowed out by the time Keith nudges Lance back onto the cotton sheets. He hovers over Lance, burnished black and silver like a tall, shadowy god, except there’s a blankness looming behind his gaze, and it sits heavily in the pit of Lance’s chest. Gives him the distinct sensation that something is slipping through the cracks of his fingers.

And when they make love that night, in the darkest early hours, even their rhythm is off, their bodies out of sync in a way they’ve never been before — careless and chaotic, desperate to see how fast they can outrun the morning — but Lance arches into it, anyway; into the momentum, into the white-hot pressure, curling a leg around Keith’s waist to urge him on because, _fuck_, does he need this. He needs the heat of their skin to burn him raw. Needs Keith to kiss him until he bleeds, and leave fingertip-shaped bruises on his hips, so that when the sun eventually rises he’ll still be able to feel him there.

Just the noise Lance makes when he comes is all it takes for Keith to follow suit; clumsily, turbulently. They rock against each other a few more times, tempo stilted, then gradually slowing.

The sound of their ragged breath fills the aftermath. As Lance’s vision returns, he paws gently at Keith’s damp hairline, and thinks he feels Keith tremble where he’s tucked into the crook of his neck, but then he thinks that can’t be right because Keith isn’t the trembling type. He never has been. He’s always so steady, strong, _unshaken_ — 

Lance’s heartbeat suddenly starts pounding in his throat, fast and wrong.

“Hey…” he tries to whisper, unable to find his voice before Keith’s weight is shifting off and away. 

Keith keeps his back to Lance as he scoots to the edge of the bed, pausing there just long enough to wipe his eyes dry with the heels of his palms. He’s discreet about it, but not so much that Lance doesn’t notice how his posture has become hunched and guarded, how his head is bowed and angled away to conceal his face. That vulnerable little hitch in his exhale that often precedes a sob. 

“Gonna grab some water,” he mumbles absently, lamely. It doesn’t sound at all like him.

Dazedly, as though staggering through a fog, Lance props himself up onto his elbows, watching with wide, worried eyes as Keith’s half-lit silhouette steps into a pair of boxers and then flees the room. He continues staring numbly at the empty doorway for a long while like he expects something to appear out of the murk.

He doesn’t chase after Keith, although he wonders if maybe he should’ve.

It’s much later when the door opens again. Footsteps pad tentatively across the hardwood. The mattress creaks and bends. Lance lays still, faking unconsciousness without even so much as a shudder against Keith’s body settling beside him. He imagines Keith, just inches away, staring up at the ceiling with a clouded gaze, his breathing shallow and soft.

Lance wonders what he’s thinking, but he doesn’t ask.

And then he wonders if maybe he should’ve. 

* * *

It goes like this: the two of them standing at a terminal gate in the fluorescent-bright, sterile chill of the airport, tethered at the hand. There’s a one-way ticket in Keith’s back pocket and an overhead monitor flashing a long list of departures at them, mocking them. Keith’s flight is perfectly, tragically on time.

Lance sighs and tightens his grip, but he doesn’t dare go in for a kiss. He wants to, desperately, but he doesn’t want to taint the memory of it. He doesn’t want to kiss Keith and taste the goodbye on his lips.

“Call me when you land?” he asks instead.

“First thing,” promises Keith.

They do kiss, eventually, when Keith seizes the collar of Lance’s shirt and smashes their faces together like he’s trying to split someone’s nose down the middle. He breaks off with a gasp, then yanks Lance into him, squeezing hard. Lance stifles a whimper into Keith’s neck. How long will he have to go without this? How long can he survive without Keith, plastered against him, real and in the flesh? His stomach clutches at the thought, and he battles the impulse to hurl right here on the scuffed tile floor.

“I love you,” says Keith, breathless.

_What if I begged, _Lance thinks. _What if I said please. What if I told you not to go because I can’t keep my fucking head above water when you’re not around. What if I grabbed onto you, like a weight on your ankle, and dragged you to the bottom with me._

“I love you back,” he says, and withdraws to offer a smile even though it’s brittle and bent in all the wrong places. Then he says, like it’s being throttled out of him: “Now go get ‘em, rockstar.”

After Lance watches him go, loses sight of him in the crowd and the distance, he makes his way back to his car and drives straight to Central Park. He sits there, alone, on the lip of Bethesda Fountain and tosses in penny, after penny, after penny. When he runs out of those, he figures dimes and quarters will do. And he’s seriously thinking about throwing himself into the water next when a gust of wind whips across his face, drying the tear tracks staining his cheeks.

It’s noticeably colder than it was a week ago. The summer is getting shorter every goddamn day. And Keith is gone, hundreds of miles away from this place. These are the facts, no matter how many times Lance tries to wish them out of existence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How we feeling, fam? Are we sad yet? I hate to be the one to tell you this, but we haven't even gotten to the break-up scene yet. That said, this might be a good time to note (or re-note) the tag that aggressively states what a happy ending this fic is going to have lol. 
> 
> PS, if you haven't already checked it out, I made a playlist for this fic! Click the link for some jams :) 
> 
> [FIC PLAYLIST](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0CROuZs0SFw5RSegp8oaFD?si=wav9e2tFTN2K0HlW9kKSWg)
> 
> [TUMBLR](https://starlightments.tumblr.com/)  
[TWITTER](https://twitter.com/starlightment)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, you didn't read that wrong: there are now five chapters instead of four! Long story short, this chapter would've been a total monster if I hadn't decided to split it up, and probably would've taken me doubly as long to finish, so. Here we are!! Sorry to prolong the happy ending even more, friends, but I promise it'll be worth it! 
> 
> There's some nsfw stuff in the second "then" section of this chapter, just so everyone knows. Pretty obvious when it starts, but I always like to give a heads-up. :)

**. . .**

**now.**

It takes all goddamn weekend for Lance to finally stop obsessing about the kiss and, even then, he still finds himself catching an occasional glimpse of it in the background of his brain. Hazy half-visions, little pinpricks of memory stinging behind his eyes in between blinks.

The worst is at night, when there’s nothing else to do and nothing left to distract him, and the edges of his dreams are all bruised lips and tangled heat, and send Lance jolting awake in bed, flustered, covered in sweat and trails of gooseflesh where Keith had touched him, tasted him, _ravaged_ him.

He’s definitely not obsessing, though.

But even if he were — _which he’s not_ — that doesn’t mean it has to be a whole thing. It doesn’t even have to be half of a thing or any percent of a thing whatsoever. It’d been a mistake. They’d been arguing, needling, a little too pent-up with adrenaline to keep their heads on straight, is all. A fluke. An accident. The worst kind of habit to fall back into.

And now that it’s out of his system for good, Lance can finally and happily move on.

Right? 

He’s been telling himself that the cut-off will be cathartic — like the first drop of rain after a drought, like spring flowers blooming after the longest, deadest winter — because all those agonizing months of heartache have to lead somewhere, don’t they? That’s how it works: scars are supposed to heal, bones are supposed to mend, and there’s supposed to be light at the end of every tunnel with a newer, stronger, brighter version of Lance waiting on the other side.

That’s what he’s been banking on, anyway.

He’s been telling himself that someday, maybe years down the road, he’ll be able to look back and laugh whenever he thinks about how madly, disastrously in love he was. It’ll be just another bad decision added to the archive.

A fluke.

An accident.

One less roadblock standing in his way.

—_Right?_

* * *

“Happy birthday!” cheer two vivacious voices as soon as Lance steps foot into the café that morning.

He barely has a moment to process — let alone _dodge_ — the blurry bodies hurtling forward at lightning speed and swallowing him up into a ferocious embrace. The high-pitched yelp that flies out of him is promptly muffled by someone’s armpit, someone’s elbow digging into his ribs, a swishy ponytail whipping him in the face.

“Can’t — breathe —” he wheezes, or attempts to, wiggling his limbs like a codfish out of water.

“Oh, I _love_ birthday sandwich hugs,” Romelle coos, her arms wrapped around Lance’s head affectionately.

“You can say that again,” agrees Hunk. “It just feels so right, like tuna and mayo or — ooh! Baloney and cheese!”

Lance grunts, “Buddy, you’re gonna get kneed in _your_ baloney if you don’t —”

But he isn’t given any time to make good on that threat before Romelle yanks him out of the huddle and totes him over to the counter where there’s a fancy little cupcake waiting for him, topped with sprinkles and a flickering birthday candle.

“Ta-dah!” she says. “We made it just for you. Well, Hunk made it. I watched.” Then she purses her lips, vaguely miffed. “Apparently I’m _still_ not allowed to touch anything with a power button.”

“_Still_ scraping dried cookie batter off the kitchen ceiling,” Hunk mumbles tiredly in reply, appearing at Lance’s side and slinging an arm around his best friend’s shoulder. “Just saying.”

Lance melts into him, grinning. “Aw, you guys…”

“Now go ahead,” chirps Romelle. “Blow out your candle and make a wish.”

A wish, huh?

Oh, Lance has a wish, alright, and he’s going to use every ounce of birthday magic to make sure it comes true this year. Resolutely, he rolls up his shirt sleeves and glares down at that tiny flame like he’s challenging it to a duel. 

Something _extraordinary_, Lance thinks as he fills up his lungs.

_Please, oh, please let him find it this time_ —

He’s suddenly interrupted by the bell, the swinging door, and then — lastly and most suddenly of all — Keith’s presence idling near the entrance. Hunk and Romelle both wince upon seeing him, looking panicked and half-ready to bolt, clearly still traumatized by Keith’s previous visit, when he barged in here like a wolf with the scent of fresh blood in his nose. Quite a confusing contrast to how he carries himself now: quiet and hesitant, hands restless at his sides until he has the good sense to tuck them into his pockets. 

“Uh,” he says at last. “Morning.”

“Morning,” Lance blurts back a bit too loudly, all the air rushing out of him in one explosive gust, “to you, too.”

The silence that ensues is an awkward one, which Lance doesn’t find terribly surprising, seeing as the last time they spoke they were shouting. And the last time they made this much eye contact they were seconds away from making out against a wall. 

“How was your weekend?” Keith manages to ask after a while.

“Oh,” says Lance, nodding, the gesture all jerky and stiff. “Great. It was great. Yours?”

“Also great.”

“Great. I mean, that’s great. That is was… great.”

Romelle, wincing for a completely different reason now, leans toward Hunk and mutters, “I think I preferred it when they were fighting, honestly.”

Hunk, naturally, tries jumping to the rescue. “Soy milk cappuccino, light foam,” he pipes up pleasantly. “Right, Keith?”

“Uh, yeah, that’s — thanks. But. I’m just here to talk to Lance.” Keith gives his wide-eyed audience a wary sweep of his gaze. “Outside?”

Hunk says nothing more; just squeezes Lance’s shoulder a little bit tighter. In response, Lance throws him a look as if to assure, sans words, that he’ll be fine. Because he will be. Probably.

Lance smooths out the bottom of his apron and clears his throat. “Take five, troops,” he announces to the room. “I’ll, uh. Be right back.”

“Aye, aye, captain.”

He follows Keith outside and onto the stoop, stuttering to a halt when Keith pivots around to face him. Lance keeps his arms crossed and very pointedly does not allow his gaze to drop below Keith’s nose.

“Hi,” Keith finally says.

Lance’s nostrils flare in annoyance. “Hi. Yes. Hello.” 

“There’s a reason I came by, I swear,” grumbles Keith. He licks his lips, which Lance definitely doesn’t notice because he’s still _definitely_ not looking. “I just wanted to —”

“I think we should call it,” Lance bursts out, startling them both.

Keith’s mouth freezes mid-sentence. “Call it,” he echoes flatly.

“Yeah, y’know,” Lance clarifies. “A truce, a ceasefire, a clean break. Whatever. Just, like —” He makes a swift chopping gesture with his hand. “—_boom_. Kaput. Done.” 

But, even with the demonstration, Keith looks like he can’t compute; like he’s trying to wrestle with something huge, something mind-numbing, potentially life-altering. He sucks in a breath and goes, “I —”

“Listen, Keith,” Lance interrupts again, hastily, before the words get tangled and refuse to budge, “about the other day? That was — actually, I dunno what the hell it was, but it happened. And now it’s over. And I think it should probably _stay_... over.”

“Is that what you want?” Keith asks, his voice soft in a way that doesn’t match the expression on his face.

“I think it’s for the best,” says Lance, with finality and crisp consonants, because that’s how he’s been practicing it, “if we just stay out of each other’s way from now on.”

Keith bristles at that, his frown twisting into a disgruntled snarl. “Says the guy who kissed me out of nowhere.”

“You — you kissed me back!”

“You kissed me _first_, Lance.” Keith’s hands are out of his pockets now, balled into fists and white-knuckled with tension. “You _kissed_ me.”

“Go ahead and let the whole friggin’ block hear about it, why don’t you,” hisses Lance. “Wanna put it on a billboard or something? _Jeez_.” 

Keith grunts exasperatedly. “Forget it,” he mutters, and begins trudging down the steps at double time. 

“What, that’s it?” Lance calls out after him. “Thought you said you came by for a reason.”

“It’s nothing,” says Keith; a gruff sound, scraped from within. “Just — happy birthday.”

Lance watches him disappear down the sidewalk with a general sense of discomfort crawling under his skin, and he wonders when it’ll stop, when he’ll start feeling the way he thought he would in this moment: invigorated, liberated, like finding his footing on broken ground. But it doesn’t feel anything like that. He doesn’t feel better at all. There’s nothing but a cold sting inside.

Everything just feels infinitely, impossibly _worse_.

* * *

**then.**

Lance comes staggering out of the library and into the late afternoon sun — a bulky stack of textbooks weighing down his arms and a cold, campus-grade coffee from the student commissary balancing on top — when his phone begins vibrating in his jeans. He reaches for his pocket one-handed, feels his impatience spiking with each passing buzz, and catches a fleeting flash of Keith’s name lighting up his screen before he’s eagerly slamming the device to his ear. 

“Hey — _shit_,” he says as he fumbles his grip on the books and watches one of them bounce down the concrete steps. “Hey there, baby.” 

There’s a lot happening on the other end — clinking glassware, indistinct chatter, the sudden pop of a champagne cork — followed by Keith’s voice, barely breaking through the wall of sound: “Hey — can you — …Lance?”

“Hi, yeah, it’s me,” Lance half-shouts. “Where are you? I can hardly even hear you.”

“What?” 

“It’s — too — fucking — _loud_ —”

“Hang on,” says Keith. Some rustling can be heard, like maybe he’s covering the receiver with his hand and weaving through the commotion. Another pop, more chatter, and then the noise is finally muffled behind the thump of a door sealing shut in the background. Keith huffs in relief. “Sorry. I’m at this… brunch thing,” he explains.

Lance’s entire face brightens. “Brunch?” he parrots, fighting a laugh. “Did you — like, you, _personally_ — just say _brunch_?”

Keith grumbles indecipherably into the phone.

“Oh man!” Lance crows and this time he does laugh, big and obnoxious, a full-body cackle. “Wait, no, this is amazing. This is the best thing ever. Please tell me you’re wearing _khakis_ right now, Keith, I _need_ to know.” 

“Wasn’t my idea, trust me,” says Keith. “Kolivan insisted that I come. Kept calling it a networking event, but judging by all the booze he’s ordering and all the networking he’s definitely _not_ doing, pretty sure it’s just an excuse to get wasted on company dime.”

“Can’t help but notice you’re not denying the khakis, though.” 

“Lance,” groans Keith, “focus.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Lance says, stifling back another wave of amusement. He waddles down the stairs to collect his fallen book, setting the rest of them aside so that he can take a seat on the bottom step and stretch out his legs. “So, bottomless mimosas and schmoozing with socialites, huh? Doesn’t sound like such a bad deal to me.”

“To you, maybe,” Keith mutters tersely. “These people only like talking about themselves, and how _famous_ they think they are and their stupid kale smoothies, and it’s… it’s _weird_. I don’t — I’m not —” He cuts himself off with a sigh, slow and staticky through the phone. “—I’m just not good at this sort of thing.”

His words wipe the grin clean off Lance’s lips. If Lance were anyone else, he might think to blame Keith’s short fuse or his innate dislike of all things superficial, but he knows Keith. He _knows_ him. There’s doubt in his voice, and a trickle of vulnerability, no matter the front he’s putting up to protect himself. Lance can sense it, even from miles away.

“Hey, c’mon,” he urges softly, “give yourself some credit. Kolivan could have his pick of any musician on the planet, but he chose _you_, so obviously he thinks you’re something special. And I do, too.”

Keith does not respond, though the stubborn scowl on his face is hard not to hear in the silence.

“Look,” Lance goes on, firmer now, “one day all those Hollywood wannabes out there are gonna be begging you to talk to them, and _that’s_ when you can tell them to go choke on their stupid kale smoothies.”

Despite himself, Keith lets out a snort. “You know,” he says after a thoughtful pause, “this probably wouldn’t suck as much if you were here.”

A delighted thrill zips through Lance, his smile inching back into place. “Yeah?”

“Mm.”

“And what exactly would you do with me, if I was there?”

The line goes quiet on Keith’s end for a brief, incredulous beat. 

“Lance.”

“What?” Lance answers unashamedly. “I know I’m not the only one who would _kill_ for some hot hand-holding action right about now. Just you and me and some deep-exfoliating face masks.” He tosses his head back with a blissed-out groan, long and exaggerated, ignoring the puzzled stares from a trio of students walking by. “Feeding each other leftover egg rolls and watching one of those super sexy true crime docs on Netflix, _oh baby_.” 

Keith suddenly makes a strange noise, like maybe he’s trying to cough but the sound gets stuck halfway in his throat. “This, uh,” he says. “This conversation did not go where I thought it was going.”

Lance pretends to gasp, mock-scandalized. “Keith Kogane, you _animal_.”

Keith laughs out loud at that, abruptly, infectiously, his breath raspy with the force of it, and then Lance’s own laughter is slipping right out of him like a familiar song, every note perfectly harmonized. When he squeezes his eyes shut, he can imagine how Keith looks: grinning, canines gleaming, cheeks dimpled and flushed behind his open palm. It makes Lance tremble twice as hard; makes him ache all over and think _god, I miss you_ so fervently he’s almost certain he says it aloud.

He doesn’t, though, because there’s just no telling what else might unravel if he tugs on that string. 

Of course he can say that he misses Keith, _of course_, but how does he say that he might die from it? That he misses him in the morning, every single morning, when he wakes up feeling heavy and sick with the sort of longing that makes him want to scratch his own heart out of his chest. That he misses him at night when he falls asleep alone, always facing the wall so that he doesn’t have to look at the emptiness beside him where Keith’s body should be. He misses Keith’s heartbeat and feeling how it speeds up whenever he leans in for a kiss. It’s a constant thing, missing him. It’s messy and inexorable and soul-sucking _agony_.

But what would that make Lance, if he were to spill his guts to Keith like that? Selfish, probably. The blubbering boyfriend, who can’t even handle a week’s worth of distance without losing his shit, regardless of their conviction when they swore to each other that they’re going to make it work, because this is Keith’s moment and Lance is not going to tear him away from that. He needs to be the steady one this time. He needs to be all backbone and thumbs-up and _knock ‘em dead, baby, you got this._

He _needs_ to, for both their sakes.

Then the door thumps open once again, letting the outside world back in like a busted flood gate. Laughter seeps through the speakers, in a flurry of voices that Lance doesn’t recognize.

“Hey,” Keith mutters all of a sudden, “I gotta go. I love you.” 

“Oh, right, yeah,” says Lance, reluctant to let him go. “I love —”

The call disconnects, just a piercing little _click_, and the noise dies in Lance’s ear. He sits there for a while, with his books and his coffee and a twinge between his ribs that beats out of time with his heart, until the old clock tower behind the library tolls a new hour.

“I love you back,” Lance finishes under his breath, to an empty screen, to absolutely no one.

* * *

**now. **

They have a small celebration this year: there’s cake (courtesy of Hunk) and a very enthusiastically off-key rendition of Happy Birthday (courtesy of the McClains) as Lance holds the twins, one on each knee, and lets them help blow out his half of the candles. They all stay up too late, laughing over wine and amusing anecdotes from years gone by. Lance laughs along with them, for the most part. He takes the teasing in stride, even doles out a few snappy wisecracks of his own, fakes enough of a smile to keep his family from noticing how cut up he feels on the inside.

Afterwards, once everyone else has gone to bed, Lance is sprawled across the living room couch. He’s awake but trying not to be, waiting for the familiar sounds of home — his mother humming to herself as she scrubs the dishes, crickets singing behind the screen door to his right, the laugh-track of whatever corny 80’s sitcom is playing on TV — to drag him under.

He’s almost there when his abuela enters the room, looking just like he’s always loved her the most, with house slippers and her hair done up in a dozen curlers. She gives Lance’s long legs a smack and he lifts them so she can sit, then settles his feet in her lap.

“It’s late,” she tells him, like he doesn’t already know.

“I’m old now,” he replies dryly. “Bedtime’s a hoax.”

“Not too old for presents, I hope,” She reveals a box, neatly wrapped in shiny paper and a big blue bow.

Lance sits up, grinning wide. “I knew it,” he says as he takes the gift and shakes it. “I always knew I was the favorite grandkid around here.” 

“Well, _I’m_ not allowed to say it,” Estela plays along, “but you just did.”

Laughing, he tears through the wrapping and opens the box, unveiling what lies within: an apron, folded between layers of crunchy tissue paper. But not just any old apron — it’s _hers_, Lance realizes immediately, with a surge of emotion. The fabric is softer than his own; worn out, roughed up, raw-edged in some places and patched up like a quilt in others. Lance runs a thumb over her initials, recalling the day he sat in her lap and watched her sew them into the front pocket by hand, carefully, tenderly. Estela let him choose the thread color, and so five-year-old Lance had picked out this vibrant cherry-red because it reminded him of the lipstick she always wears.

“Lita,” he says, quietly and meaningfully.

“It’s about time someone put this old thing to good use again, don’t you think?”

Lance’s heart, so full just moments ago, deflates like a balloon. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “Guess so.”

She gives him a rueful look. “I know it isn’t much, but —” 

“No, are you kidding?” Lance interjects. “It’s not that. I just… I dunno. Got a lot on my mind.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” she offers. 

“Not really.”

“Is it about Keith?”

“Not… really?”

Estela pats his knee reassuringly before returning her attention to the TV. She doesn’t pressure him for more, unlike Lance’s siblings or his incorrigible mother, who meddles and nags Lance to his breaking point and then some. But not Lita; _never_ Lita. She’s eternally patient, giving Lance the privacy he needs to fester — or maybe freak out — until he’s ready to come to her. And he does, inevitably.

Like when he was a freshman in high school, shoulders heavy with the burden of his first big secret, too young to know anything about himself, really, except that he’s had to pull his eyes off other boys in the locker room on more than one occasion. It had scared him shitless at the time, and it’d been his abuela who held his hand and gave him courage while he tearfully came clean to his parents. 

Or earlier this summer, when Lance left school and took the train back to New York with absolutely nothing to show for himself but a broken heart. He remembers the dread in his gut as he rolled past the Hudson. He remembers how his father could barely look him in the eye over dinner. And then he remembers Estela, smiling, handing him the keys to the café with such sureness that even he believed, for a little while, he wouldn’t let her down.

But now, he thinks, he probably already has. 

“Lita,” he says, and by the time she looks at him, it’s too late to take it back. “Do you think you ever would’ve sold the café?” He squirms a bit. “Hypothetically.”

“Well, _hypothetically_,” she says, in a tone that makes Lance suspect he isn’t being as subtle as he’d hoped, “if the circumstances had been right at the time, then I suppose I would’ve considered it.”

Lance startles. “Wait, seriously?” 

“Were you expecting a different answer?”

“Yes!” he splutters. “Your whole heart is in that place, Lita, your whole _life_, all your memories. Wouldn’t you… miss it?”

The wrinkles around her eyes deepen as she grins. “Memories don’t live in coffee shops, niño,” she explains to him, poking at the center of Lance’s chest. “They live right here.” 

Lance pouts so spectacularly that it makes Estela chuckle, like how she used to when Lance was a child, sulking over broken crayons or losing a kickball match to his brothers.

“Now that we’ve sorted that,” she says, “you can tell me the other reason you’re so upset.”

“There are _zero_ reasons,” cries Lance. “What makes you think there’s another reason?”

“I know what you look like when you’re upset,” Estela reminds him, both accusatory and affectionate, all things considered. “And I also know what you look like when you’re upset about a certain boy.”

Lance blows a raspberry in defense. “Sorry, Lita, but your freaky third eye wisdom is a little off this time,” he says, indignant. “As of today, as a birthday gift to myself, there are officially no more boys in my life to be upset about. _Especially_ certain two-timing, coffee-swindling, stupid-pretty-faced-idiot ones.”

“Mm, I see,” she hums. “You two finally talked everything out, then, did you?”

“Well,” Lance squeaks out, his voice pitched oddly high, “it wasn’t really a talk, like… in the traditional sense?”

“_Ay dios, que voy a hacer contigo_ —” 

“Hey, no, look,” insists Lance. “This is progress for me, okay? I honestly should’ve put an end to things a long time ago when I had the chance. Should’ve just skipped over all the salty revenge drama and moved on with my life.”

“And what about Keith?” she asks plainly. “What is he supposed to do?”

Lance shrugs again, fast and dismissive. “Keith didn’t seem to have any trouble cutting ties the first time, so it’s not like this time’ll be any different. Besides,” he continues, sneering, “he’s got the bar to focus on now. I mean, hell, the guy’s probably even got a whole career waiting for him back in LA, if he wants it. So what does he need me for, anyway?” A pause, as his own words sink in, as something sharp and terrible curls in his belly. “What has he _ever_ needed me for?” 

“You know how to get the answer to that question, don’t you?”

“Don’t say it.”

“Talk to him, niño,” Estela says. “_Really_ talk to him.” 

“But _why?”_ whines Lance.

“Because I didn’t raise you to run away from your mistakes.” She takes Lance’s chin between two fingers, tilts it to her liking so that Lance has no choice but to look her in the eye. “All you can do is get up and try to make things right. No excuses,” she says firmly. “You’ll never find the closure you need until you do.”

They stay like that, locked in stalemate, for a solid minute, but it’s no use. Lance learned his stubbornness from her, after all.

“Okay, fine,” he concedes with a huff, scrunching his nose. “Forget what I said about your freaky third eye wisdom. It’s still as freaky as ever.”

Estela releases his chin and gives his cheek a pat. “Of course it is,” she says, and snatches up the TV remote sitting between them.

* * *

**then. **

“This is just _pathetic_, McClain,” are the first words out of Iverson’s mouth as soon as Lance approaches his desk after class. Lance’s father has already warned him about the school’s infamous economics professor whenever he speaks of his own Ivy League days — a big-boned, nasty-faced brute of a man, who seemingly gets some kind of sick enjoyment out of terrifying his students with scathing glares and harsh criticism — but nothing could’ve prepared Lance for _this_.

Iverson shoves a piece of paper into Lance’s hands. It appears to be yesterday’s exam, although the damn thing is so marked up and slashed through with red pen that it’s almost difficult to be sure.

“Are you serious?” Lance balks. “But I — I studied for this —”

“Study harder,” says Iverson, narrowing his beady eyes like a beast going in for the kill. “You’re in a cutthroat program, McClain. And if _this_ is the best you can do, then it’ll take much more than mommy and daddy’s alumni donation checks to keep you here. Do I make myself clear?”

_Fuck_, Lance’s mind howls as he turns and slams out of the lecture hall doors. _Fuck, fuck, fuck._

There goes his GPA. Any hope of making Dean’s List this semester — or even _passing the fucking class_, at this rate — is pretty much a lost cause. And, _oh_, he can’t wait to have _that_ little chat with his parents. While he’s at it, he might as well mention the _other_ exam he tanked last week. Or that one morning when he got kicked out of class for falling asleep on top of his finance notes because he stayed up too late the night before while studying for the very exam that he, consequently, _tanked_.

He’ll say: _Hey, mom. Hey, dad. Looks like your son really is a total loser, after all. Surprised? Neither am I. _

Or maybe: _I hate it here, I hate it here, goddammit, why did I think I could do this, why did I think I could do anything —_

Before he’s even aware of it, he’s fishing out his phone and dialing Keith’s number on instinct, the way he always does when he needs a lifeline to hold onto. It rings for a split second, then goes straight to voicemail.

“Come on,” Lance hisses under his breath. “_Pick up_.”

He calls again. Voicemail.

And he’s about to try for a third time when the screen lights up with a text from Keith.

_can’t talk right now. call you later._

“_Fuck_,” snaps Lance, throwing himself into a nearby bench and dropping his face into his hands. 

Yeah, see — that’s another thing, too.

Not only have Lance’s days been getting longer and particularly more hellish, but lately his conversations with Keith have been getting shorter and dreadfully inconsistent, to the point where Lance has considered calling Kolivan himself just to schedule an appointment with his own boyfriend. If it’s not a full line-up of gigs keeping Keith busy, then it’s always something else — something _exciting_ — because Kolivan seems to have a knack for twisting Keith’s arm, lugging him along to the sort of parties and industry events that Lance has only ever seen in movies. 

With talent like Keith’s, it’s no wonder greatness and opportunity follow him wherever he goes.

And, meanwhile, Lance is just stumbling at his heels, desperately trying to keep up.

“Are you alright?”

Lance peeks up at the girl standing in front of him. She has blonde hair and a nose piercing, and Lance recalls seeing the name _Nyma_ written on her name tag at one of their orientation events. She looks concerned, which makes sense. Lance can only imagine what his own face must look like right now.

“Yeah,” he says, taking a deep breath to compose himself. “All good, thanks.”

“Iverson can be kind of a hard-ass sometimes, huh?” she comments gently.

“Guess we all should’ve seen it coming,” mutters Lance. “Any dude who rocks a goatee like _that_ obviously means business.”

Nyma covers her mouth and giggles. It’s nice. She has a nice laugh. “Well, let me know if you want a study partner for the next exam. We could suffer together.” Her grin curls a bit shyly. “Or maybe… we could just go out to dinner, instead?” 

Lance merely gawks for a moment, caught off-guard. “Oh, um,” he says. “I appreciate the invite, but actually, I — I have a boyfriend, so.”

“_Oh_,” says Nyma, a pink flush spreading across her cheeks. “Oh god, I’m so sorry, Lance, I had no idea —”

“Nah, don’t sweat it. I mean, how were you supposed to know, anyway?”

Lance takes a pause, ruminating over how weird it is to have to speak those words. How weird and _awful_ it is to live in a world where people only know him when he’s apart from Keith.

He glances down at the phone still clasped in his hand and doesn’t even attempt to mask the halfhearted resentment in his tone as he says, “It’s not like he’s ever around or anything.” 

Nyma examines his slumped posture, then nods knowingly. “Long distance?”

“Really long,” grumbles Lance. 

“The first few months are always the toughest,” she tells him. “But hey, if you do ever wanna grab a bite — just as friends — my offer still stands.”

Lance smiles at that, small and genuine. “Thanks, Nyma,” he says. “I’ll take you up on that sometime.” 

As she goes, heading down the path and then cutting across the quad, Lance receives another text from Keith.

_everything ok?_

He kind of wants to laugh in an ironic sort of way, but it comes out halfway to a scoff, so he just silences his phone instead and shoves it to the bottom of his bag with the rest of his shit.

* * *

Lance’s phone rings to life sometime after midnight, and that, eventually, is what wakes him. He fumbles for it in the dark, answering at the last second with a yawn and a gravelly, “‘Lo?” 

“—Shit,” Keith’s voice hisses quietly on the other end. “Time difference. Sorry, love, I forgot —”

“Mm, no,” Lance mumbles as he shimmies back under the covers, nestling the phone between his head and the pillow so he can close his eyes and pretend it’s Keith’s mouth, his sweetest whispers, cozied up against the shell of his ear. “S’nice. Miss your voice. Keep talking.”

Keith has never been a stellar conversationalist — more of a listener than a babbler, especially in the absence of Lance’s running commentary to keep him on his toes — but Lance finds it cute that he tries, anyway. His delivery tends to come out a little on the clumsy side, a little unsure of itself, like he’s struggling for something interesting to say. As if any of that actually matters. Keith could be reciting the alphabet backwards, could grunt at him in Javanese until he’s blue in the face, and Lance’s heart would still skip about ten beats.

Tonight is no different. Keith does his best to fill the silence with details about his day, the low-pitched rumble of his breath like a cradle song to Lance, who is already on the verge of dozing off again by the time he hears Keith say, “I have a meeting with some producers next week.”

Lance pauses, waiting for his half-conscious brain to catch up. “Producers?”

“Kolivan thinks they can help me put an album together. Like, a real album.”

“Wow,” says Lance. “That’s… huge.”

Keith hums vaguely in reply. It sounds sort of like a shrug. “What about you?” he asks, changing the subject. “How’d your exam go?”

There’s another pause, heavy and hollow. “Oh,” Lance forces out. He blinks his eyes open, then flits them over to the foot of his bed where that exam is still buried in his bag, crumpled up and bleeding red ink.

Shame simmers angrily behind his cheeks and, even though he knows Keith can’t see, it still embarrasses him. Just thinking about it is humiliating enough, and especially now that it’s being stacked up against Keith and all his burgeoning success — meetings and managers and producers and albums — it puts a sour taste in Lance’s mouth like no other. It makes his skin itch, his bones rattle.

But, god, more than anything: it _disgusts_ him.

Because he knows it’s wrong to be the kind of guy who keeps score, who counts a win for Keith as a loss for himself, but Lance hasn’t felt right since he got here, anyway, and sometimes he feels like he’s being consumed by it; by how tragically he’s failing and how high Keith is soaring.

So much higher on his own, it seems, than he ever was with —

“Lance?” Keith speaks softly into the phone. “You still there?”

Lance swallows it all down.

“Good. It went good,” he says. It tastes foul. It tastes like a lie. “Pretty sure I aced it.”

“Knew you would,” Keith says automatically. Something in Lance’s chest constricts. “I’ll let you sleep now, okay?”

“Call tomorrow?” 

“Promise.”

Again, they wane into a pause, but Lance doesn’t want to hang up just yet. He presses the phone closer, cups his hand around the receiver as if someone might overhear, then whispers, “Keith?”

“Hm?”

“I love you so much,” Lance tells him, a quiet strain in his voice that throbs when he says it. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I do,” says Keith, and he suddenly sounds very far away. “Now get some rest.”

* * *

Keith, as it turns out, does not call the following day.

Although, technically, it’s only 10:53pm and even earlier in LA, which means there’s still some time before Lance has every right to go fully ballistic.

He might already be going a little bit ballistic, but that’s not the point.

The point is that Lance has been glued to his phone since he rolled out of bed this morning, jittery with anticipation, counting the hours, watching them stretch out like a rubber band. The point is that it’s late now, and Lance is holed up in his apartment on a Friday night, pacing the floor until he’s feverish and disoriented.

Really, there’s nothing stopping him from calling Keith himself and giving the guy a _very loud_ piece of his mind, but — no. That’s not the point, either. The point is that Keith said he would call and he hasn’t, and the _goddamn point_ is that Keith has never — not even once — broken a promise before. 

So Lance unlocks his phone and dials the nearest pizza joint, instead.

If he’s going to throw himself a proper pity party, then there might as well be pizza.

But by the time Lance places his order and flops belly-down onto the sofa, he doesn’t even have much of an appetite anymore. His stomach roils with something thick and vile, with the terrible possibility that maybe Keith _forgot_ about him. Just slipped right out of his mind because maybe he doesn’t think about Lance as much or as intensely as Lance thinks about him.

Lance is _always_ thinking about him. Maybe that’s part of the problem, too, but whatever. He looks back on their memories like they’re photos in a scrapbook, each one paused and pristine. Sometimes he wishes he could do the same now; that he could grab onto Keith and paste him onto the paper, pin him between the pages.

Except that’s not how gravity works.

He can’t force Keith to stay in one place if he’s already being pulled somewhere else.

There’s a knock on the door. Lance checks his phone: 11:35. Must be dinner time. He peels himself off the sofa to go answer it. Gets his hand on the knob. Swings it open.

Then freezes. 

Because standing there in the dim light of the hallway — all dark and lean and stupid-handsome, his mouth twisted into a smirk that is equal parts devilish and dreamy — is _Keith_.

In seconds, Lance’s own mouth falls slack with sudden, heart-stopping shock.

Keith chuckles at the sight. “I’m assuming this is yours,” he says, casually referencing the pizza box in his hand, “since you’re probably the only weirdo on the planet who gets mushrooms _and_ pineapple on the same —”

“Oh my god,” gasps Lance, the sound caught high in his throat. “You — what — _oh my god_,” he says again, over and over, until the words are just breathless nonsense on his tongue and he’s launching himself straight into Keith’s arms like a battering ram. Another chuckle comes from Keith, whose body sways on impact, then braces itself against Lance’s weight, steadying him around the waist with one hand while the pizza balances precariously in the other.

Lance holds onto him, gathers up fistfuls of soft leather, feeling dizzy from all this whiplashing emotion. “Why —” he tries to get out. “What’re you —”

“Had the weekend off,” answers Keith, whispers it into the skin behind Lance’s ear where his lips are pressed. “Wanted to surprise you.”

Lance’s chest flutters ridiculously at that. “You and your surprises,” he grins. “Always knew there was a soft, gooey center under all that grumpy mullet.”

“Only because of you,” says Keith.

“_God_, Kogane, why are you _not_ kissing me already,” Lance swoons, “Just kiss me, kiss me, _kiss me_.”

His mouth is on Lance’s quicker than anything, more than happy to oblige. It’s wet and vigorous; a little sloppy in their enthusiasm, but, _dear god_, does it set Lance’s insides aflame. He’s already feeling restless, already hungry and wild with desire after just one kiss, his hands grappling for any part of Keith within reach like he can’t decide where he wants to touch him first. There’s no use being subtle now, he figures, not when he’s been without this for so long. 

But Keith’s patience has always been a flimsier, more volatile creature than Lance’s, something not to be poked or prodded without consequences, so it comes as no surprise when he spins them and presses Lance up against the door to continue kissing him, deep and savage. Lance hazily hears the door click shut behind him, the pizza box landing somewhere on the floor, and then a lilting little whine that must’ve come from himself as Keith hoists him off the ground, hiking Lance’s legs up around his waist.

“Missed this,” says Lance, softly panting now that Keith’s lips have pulled away to trail damp kisses down his throat. “Missed you so much, _fuck_, you have no idea.”

Keith makes a noise that almost sounds painful against Lance’s clavicle. “Where’s your —”

“That way,” Lance mumbles. He doesn’t signal toward any particular direction; just prods insistently at Keith’s muscly shoulder until he moves. “Just — go that way.”

Carrying Lance across the room while his attention is otherwise preoccupied with the hickey he’s leaving on Lance’s skin is a sexy feat in and of itself, but then Keith is lowering Lance onto the bed and shucking his own belt from its loops in the same fluid motion, and that — oh, _that_ makes Lance’s head swim. Keith slips out of his jacket next, manages to get his pants undone and only partway off before Lance decides he doesn’t want to wait anymore. He _can’t_. He grabs Keith by the wrist and yanks him all the way down. 

“Lance —” growls Keith.

As if in response, Lance hooks a limber leg around Keith’s middle and uses it to bring them flush together. “Like this,” he says, gasping when he arches up, rubbing himself against Keith’s thigh. “Yeah, _like this_.” 

Keith catches on pretty fast; seems to not only understand Lance’s desperation, but match it in spades. He rocks back, adjusting himself so that their hips align, so that there’s delicious friction with every thrust, so that Lance’s body goes white-hot and tingly all over. The mattress heaves beneath their weight, a sporadic _thump-thump-thump_ against the drywall that’s bound to earn Lance some dirty looks from his neighbor the next time they cross paths in the mailroom. He’ll worry about that later. 

Right now, though, he’ll bury his face into the crook of Keith’s neck. He’ll cling to him and breathe in his scent like a drug and babble his name over and over because he’s getting closer, so close, _so close_ —

“Keith, I —” Lance whimpers, heat coiling rapidly in his abdomen. “— m’gonna —”

All it takes is Keith reaching a hand between them and palming Lance through his boxers once, twice, three times, and then Lance is coming, crying out, seeing a hundred new colors explode behind his lids. Keith comes seconds after, groaning, and collapses bonelessly on top of Lance.

Their lips meet for another kiss, soft and sensual. Lance’s pulse still thunders in his ear as he combs his fingers through the front of Keith’s hair, pushes it back to reveal every inch of his sweat-dappled face, and lets himself look and look and look. 

“You’re here,” whispers Lance.

Keith smiles down at him, cheeks dimpled, eyes bright. “I’m here,” he whispers back.

They end up splitting the pizza together. Lance eats Keith’s pineapple, and Keith finishes off Lance’s crust. It’s perfect.

And later that evening, when Keith is sprawled out in his bed in a borrowed pair of NYU sweatpants, sucking leftover pizza grease off his fingertips, it occurs to Lance that this is the happiest he’s felt in a very long time. 

* * *

**now.**

He waits until it’s dark and after closing time to go searching for Keith, mainly because it takes Lance that long to actually work up the nerve, but also to avoid the prying eyes of his workmates. Hunk’s been giving him funny looks ever since his squabble on the stoop with Keith, and the last thing Lance needs is to stir up any unnecessary suspicion. 

He just needs to put these feelings to rest, once and for all.

And, whether Lance likes it or not, Lita’s advice is sound, as per usual. He and Keith have never really discussed the details of their break-up at length — or ever, at all — always lashing out and gritting their teeth whenever something veers too close to the past. It’s no wonder they’ve never gotten far enough to even attempt clearing the air, but maybe that’s exactly what Lance needs to do. Sit Keith down. Have it out like men. Bite the bullet. Get some answers. Maybe _then_ he’ll be able to move forward.

With this hope in mind, Lance locks up the café, tiptoes down the street, and slips through Luxite’s big metal door without making a peep. The place always has an eerie glow to it, like some sort of alien mothership, but it’s even spookier after hours. There’s not a single bartender or busboy milling about, which suits Lance just fine. It means he can consult with Keith in private, in case things happen to go south. He just needs to find him first. 

“Need something?” 

Abruptly, Lance swings toward the voice, footsteps faltering at what he finds beneath the dusky light. Shiro, occupying one of the bar stools, hands wrapped around a glass of something amber-colored. Whatever it is, it looks relatively untouched. He watches Lance through the shadows, careful and calculating; lets his eyes land on him like an accusation. 

It takes Lance a full moment to collect himself. “No,” he answers unbiddenly, enduring Shiro’s skeptical brow with a slight grimace. “Well, actually — I’m looking for Keith.”

“He’s not here,” says Shiro, his words sharp. “He took off about an hour ago.”

“Do you know where he went?” asks Lance.

The withering look that crosses Shiro’s face has Lance snapping his mouth shut so fast his molars clack.

“Uh, right,” he mutters lamely, reaching for the back of his neck. “Gonna take that as a no. Thanks, anyway. I’ll just… figure it out, I guess.”

He’s making to retreat when he hears Shiro calling out after him.

“Maybe you shouldn’t, Lance.”

A chill sweeps through him, halts him dead in his tracks. Lance turns to meet Shiro’s eyes directly, unafraid this time. “Shouldn’t what,” he snaps before he can stop himself.

Shiro lowers his gaze, sighing like he’s contemplating the weight of his next words or if he ought to speak them at all. And Lance waits, wondering if he will, daring him to try.

Until, finally, Shiro shakes his head. “It’s none of my business,” he decides, and takes a long sip of his drink. 

Lance snorts. “A little late to be playing the courtesy card,” he says. “Might as well just spit it out now, dude.”

“You two are both adults,” Shiro begins slowly, “so I can’t tell you what to do.” His jaw works for a second, and then he grits out, “But Keith is my little brother. And if you keep on stringing him back and forth like this, then it’s just… I think it’s just going to break his heart.” 

“What, you mean like how he already broke mine?” Lance fires back, a flash of defiance burning across his face. “Look, I’m not saying I haven’t been acting like a jerk lately, but at least I’m not the jerk who walked out, like it didn’t even mean anything. No, I’m just the one who got _ghosted_ by the guy who said he loved me. The _only_ one, apparently, who actually gave a _flying fuck_ about us. So careful who you’re pointing fingers at around here, Shiro, ‘cause the truth is that you have no idea what really happened.”

“And neither do you,” replies Shiro, solemn, “if that’s what you honestly think.”

Without warning, Shiro stands up, leaves his drink unfinished, and walks around to the other side of the bar. Everything about the way he moves, the way he reaches for a new glass off the shelf, is poised and statuesque. Lance’s chest beats under the silence, echoing like a canyon.

“You know, Keith’s always been a handful, ever since he was little,” says Shiro, his voice a low drawl. “Broken bones, reckless stunts, always picking fights. I swear that kid’s been giving me grey hairs from the moment he was born.” He gingerly pours another drink, fills it halfway with the same gold liquid he’s been sipping on. “But right after you two split up… I’ve never been more worried about him.”

Shiro sets the drink onto the countertop. It’s not a proper invitation, but Lance inches forward, anyway, settling onto a bar stool and gripping the glass, just to feel its coolness against his clammy palm.

“He wasn’t answering my calls either. I didn’t know where he was, I didn’t even know if he was okay. He just showed up one night, right on my doorstep, and he looked…” Shiro doesn’t finish that sentence, his throat closing around it. The tension in his brow twists even harder, still pained by the memory, even now. “He stopped playing music after that. He stopped doing _anything_ after that, for a while. Just getting him to come work here was, ah… _challenging_, to say the least.”

Sighing, he leans his elbows onto the bar and rakes a hand through the front of his hair, messing it up. It’s the most disheveled, the most unpolished version of Shiro that Lance has ever seen. “I don’t know,” the man mutters pensively. “Maybe I’m out of bounds for telling you all this, but I just can’t have you thinking that he didn’t care about you, Lance. You were it for him. He started saving up for a ring a month after he met you, for god’s sake.”

That, finally, is what makes Lance choke on a gasp. “A month?” he splutters. “But that’s — we weren’t even, like, _together_ yet.”

Shiro breathes yet another sigh, smiling crookedly, and says, “Adam and I tried telling him to wait, but, well. You know Keith.”

“He doesn’t wait,” whispers Lance, with quiet vehemence. 

“Not when it came to you, Lance.” 

Lance thinks his heart might buckle beneath the weight of this revelation, breaking over him like the swell of a wave. Just — _how?_ How did he miss this? How did he not know? He scrambles, tries to do the math backwards and forwards in his brain, but it doesn’t add up. Not in the context of Lance’s narrative, at least — the one he strung together himself, a web of his own fears and doubt and self-loathing combined — because it had all seemed so obvious, so _stupidly_ obvious.

It had played out in Lance’s mind, in the darkest corners of his thoughts: Keith, going back to LA. Keith, getting better, getting ahead, getting a taste of something that Lance could never give him. Keith, who didn’t call. Keith, who left because it was supposed to be _easy_ for him.

Keith, who had a dream and potential and a whole extraordinary life laid out in front of him, and he gave it all up because of Lance. 

God —_ how did he not know?_

Lance springs to his feet. “The café’s yours, Shiro. You can have it,” he says adamantly, though his voice is rough and ragged. “I’ll sign the papers tomorrow, I just — I’m _done_.”

Shiro’s expression wavers, as if he might try to object, but Lance whirls away from it and heads back the way he came.

He knows exactly where he’s going now.

* * *

**then.**

Lance’s eyes peek open, slow and sticky with sleep, when he feels a pair of lips kissing their way up his spine. He wiggles as much as his lazy limbs will allow, letting out a contented little whine, and the response is a warm puff of breath lingering at his nape.

“Good morning,” whispers Keith, his voice rough and rich, like the burn of a whiskey shot.

It brings a small, dopey smile to Lance’s mouth. “Is now, gorgeous,” he drawls.

Keith continues dragging his lips along the slope of Lance’s neck, chuckling between kisses.

Carefully, curiously, Lance cranes half his face away from the pillow to get a better look behind him, where Keith is straddling his tailbone, all flushed and tousled and gloriously nude save for the bedsheets still draped around his hips. Daylight washes over him, catches the corners of his eyes and gives way to something unnaturally soft; something malleable and almost delicate enough to break, Lance muses. 

He sighs under Keith’s hands as they wander up and down, massaging his shoulders. It’s so good — the deep, rolling pressure and the heat of Keith’s palms sliding against his bare skin — that Lance feels himself shudder, a trickle of liquid arousal stirring in his belly. 

“Hey,” he admonishes, though there isn’t much bite behind it. He reaches back to poke Keith’s thigh. “Uncalled for.”

“What is?” Keith asks, sounding preoccupied.

“You,” says Lance. “_Those lips_,” he adds, stifling a gasp while the very lips in question latch onto his neck and begin to suck. “Being all sexy and distracting like… like some kinda — _sexy distraction_.”

Keith chuckles again, right into Lance’s ear this time. “Good one.”

“Shut up. I’m delirious,” Lance mumbles. “Haven’t felt this good in weeks.”

“Let me take care of you, then,” says Keith. His hands are flat to Lance’s back now, kneading in tantalizingly slow circles. “We can stay here all day, if you want.”

Lance groans low in his throat when Keith finds and pushes down on a particularly knotted mound of muscle. “_Fuuuuck_,” he hisses, his entire body spasming with a jolt of pleasure-pain.

“Yeah,” Keith purrs as if in smug agreement. “That’s not a bad idea, either.”

Lance laughs, the sound like a breathless hiccup. “Oh,” he says, rising to his elbows and, with a deft twist of his hips, bucking Keith off his perch. “I’ll show you a _bad idea_.” 

He rolls on top of Keith, who’s just laying there, stunned into stillness, with a tiny furrow between his eyes like he can’t quite decide whether he’s irritated or turned on at having been manhandled so effortlessly. Either way, it only makes Lance’s grin stretch wider as he swoops down to press it against Keith’s parted lips. Keith kisses back immediately, wastes no time getting his tongue in Lance’s mouth and his fingers in his hair, and Lance is starting to think it might not be so crazy, after all, to laze their whole day away in bed like this.

But then, on the bedside table, a phone begins to ring.

Beneath him, Keith instantly clenches up. 

“Shit,” Keith sighs, muffled behind the kiss. He turns his head toward the noise, which Lance then takes as an opportunity to nibble along his chiseled jawline. Another sigh. “It’s Kolivan.” 

Lance hums, unimpressed. “He can leave a message.”

“No,” Keith insists, nudging at Lance’s shoulders, “he’ll just keep calling if I don’t answer.”

His nudging grows more urgent the longer the ringing persists, except Lance doesn’t seem to notice that or the mounting frustration in Keith’s tone when he blocks Lance’s oncoming kiss with his hand and says, “Lance, c’mon, I’m serious.” 

“Mm, I’m about to get all _serious_ on your _mouth_ —”

“_Lance_ —”

In a flash, he gets an iron grip around Lance’s bicep and shoves; a sudden burst of aggression that goes one step beyond their typical roughhousing. Just enough to mean something. Just enough to whiplash the air out of Lance’s lungs a little bit, to flip him onto his back, hard, as the ringtone peters out and throws the entire room into utter silence.

Lance blinks up at the ceiling, trying to catch his breath, startled and, for once, speechless.

He can see the moment it registers for Keith. The way his eyes go wide with a touch of panic when he notices his own fingers digging crescent-shaped marks into the meat of Lance’s arm. Keith recoils as though he’s been burned, then falls back onto his haunches.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “I just... need to find out what he wants, so he’ll get off my back.”

“I get it,” Lance says quickly. He doesn’t really, but he lets himself say it, anyway, because it makes the crumpled line of Keith’s brow slightly less awful to look at. He sits up, playing it off with a shrug and a light, breezy tone. “No biggie. I mean, hey, such is the glamorous life of a rockstar.”

Keith, however, doesn’t even crack a smile.

“Don’t gimme that face,” says Lance, crawling across the bed to kiss Keith’s mouth, warm and chaste. “I keep telling you, babe — you’re way too pretty for frown lines.” 

This time Keith manages to huff in response, and it sounds almost enough like a chuckle that Lance leans in to kiss him again.

“You do your thing and I’ll go grab us some breakfast, yeah?”

Down the street, there’s a little corner market that Lance can’t remember the name of, but he knows it serves semi-decent coffee, so he steps into some clothes and walks over. The barista greets him with a dull glare over the top of her magazine when the shop door swings open, a wad of bright pink bubblegum caught between her front teeth.

Lance moseys up to the counter. “Hey there. Two croissants and two coffees, please,” he says, then perks up a second later, flailing his hand to recapture the barista’s attention. “Oh, actually! Could you make one of them a cappuccino with soy milk, light foam?”

Barista Girl gives him another glare, overly critical. “You know that’s just a latte, right?” she deadpans.

“Yeah, I know,” Lance beams. 

She pops her gum with a disdainful snap before firing up the espresso machine.

And, sure, he’ll admit: it’s probably a little silly to believe that _coffee_ will be able to bend him and Keith back into shape, but right now, in this moment, Lance is hopeful — even if it’s not quite enough to imitate _exactly_ what they had during those blissful summer days. Back when they were as carefree as kids and inextricably _together_, their hearts so full they thought it might kill them. Back when Lance felt less like an inconvenience, less like deadweight dragging behind, while Keith is already a million leagues ahead, doing more important, more extraordinary, profoundly _cooler_ things with his life.

But Lance won’t allow his insecurities to get the better of him — not now, not today — not when Keith is actually here, in his apartment, in his bed. He collects their breakfast and heads back outside, tilting his face skyward so that the sunshine warms his cheeks. Maybe later he’ll take Keith on a tour around campus. Maybe a trip downtown for a quick beer at the local pub. Or maybe they’ll pack a lunch and sit by the river all afternoon, simply because they can. Simply because they have time and each other and, best of all, an entire weekend to remind themselves of the way things used to be.

It’s a start, Lance tells himself. It’s _something_.

That reassurance alone has him bounding up the stairs to his apartment with newfound pep, shuffling backwards through the door as to not disturb the tray of coffee in his hands. He’s wheeling himself around again, mouth already rounded around the words to announce his return, when he spots a tall figure standing in the middle of the room.

He sees it’s Keith, obviously, but it still takes a second for Lance to digest the sight of him. Frowning and fully clothed, his hair tied back and his boots laced up, his bag slung over a broad shoulder. Nothing but an unmade bed in his wake. When he glances up and finds Lance frozen there, his expression splits in two: half furious and half anguished.

All the hope that Lance had been high on just moments ago crumbles straight to the pit of his stomach.

“What,” he murmurs after a while. “What’s going on?” 

“My meeting with the producers got pushed up,” grumbles Keith. “Kolivan, he rescheduled it, and didn’t even think to _tell me_ until now, so he’s —” His breath comes out short and harsh, stopping himself before his temper consumes him entirely. He begins again, just barely restrained, “If I don’t catch the soonest flight to LA, I won’t make it back in time.”

The words burrow deep enough into Lance’s brain to stick. “You’re leaving,” he realizes, and then feels the accompanying stab of dread, drilling straight through him like a stake, like his own chest caving inwards. “Can’t you just… I dunno, tell him to fuck off and move the meeting back to next week or —”

“What do you think I’ve been trying to do for the past twenty minutes?” asks Keith, gesturing emphatically with his phone.

“But you just got here,” Lance says, gutted, his voice all rasp.

Keith sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I know, love,” he mutters grimly into his palm. “I know.”

_He knows_.

Lance could scream at that.

He could grab it with his fist and smash it against the walls because, _no_, Keith does _not know_. Anger thrashes within him like a blustery torrent until it’s all he can feel. The pang in his chest and the hot, smoldering blood in his veins that’s been boiling for too long now. His hands shake with it, violently.

“Right,” Lance spits out, the stiffness of his jaw making it sound pinched, “well, wouldn’t want little ‘ol me to hold you up any more than I already have, so. _Yeah_.” He gives a sarcastic salute. “Happy trails, I guess.”

Before he can even witness the brunt of Keith’s reaction, Lance is storming into the kitchen and dropping the coffee tray onto the counter with a clatter. _Fuck_. What a moron he is for hoping, for assuming, for pretending this whole thing isn’t broken just because he can’t see the rips in the seams. He lays his hands flat to the laminate and prays for his racing heartbeat to let up, but there’s little he can do about it. 

From the other room, he hears, “This isn’t what I had in mind for this weekend, either, trust me.”

“‘Course not,” Lance replies, sounding petulant. That, too, is beyond his control. 

Then he hears footsteps; heavy, agitated ones as though Keith is using all his energy, all his might and brawn, to throw himself into the kitchen entryway with an outraged look on his face and demand, “You seriously think I _wanted_ this? To be leaving so soon?”

Lance glances at him, eyes dark. “You got all your stuff together pretty fast, is all I’m saying.” 

“I don’t have a choice, Lance.” 

“No, you know what — _that_,” snaps Lance, accentuating his rage by slamming a palm down onto the countertop. “That is some total _bullshit_, Keith. Lemme make it easy: you can either go party with your fancy new music pals or — god _fucking_ forbid — you can stay here with your boyfriend for _one weekend_, and guess which _you_ picked.”

The outburst only seems to rile Keith up even more, adding fuel to his flames. His brow knits tighter and his voice gets louder to rival Lance’s volume. “You obviously have no idea what you’re talking about,” he snipes back. “It’s not all fun and games out there, Lance. I’m _working_, and playing gigs, and doing whatever Kolivan fucking tells me to do because this is my _job_ now — one that I might not even have gone through with if _you_ hadn’t wanted me to.”

“Of course I wanted you to, Keith, I’m not an idiot!” cries Lance. “I’ve _always_ wanted that for you. I want you to take your shot, I want you to chase your dreams —”

“But not succeed at them, apparently.”

Lance stares, open-mouthed and scandalized, like he’s just been slapped. “Wow,” is all he gets out. “Just… fucking _wow_, dude. That’s funny — no, that’s actually _hysterical_, coming from you.” He stomps forward until there’s but an inch between them, jutting out his chin, snarling in Keith’s face. “When have I ever been anything other than your biggest fan, huh? No, really, go ahead and name _one single time_ when I wasn’t _completely_ on your side. I’ve done nothing but support you this entire time, you fucking _prick_, which is way more than I can say for _some_ people.”

Keith’s gaze narrows at him fiercely. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“It means that ever since you got on that plane it’s been a non-stop Keith-palooza around here. Just _you_, all about _you_, miles and piles of _you_,” sneers Lance, his eyes wild and seeing red. The words keep piling up, born from a place so ugly, so deeply buried, he hardly even recognizes it inside himself. “And then there’s me, wasting away in this shithole town, just twiddling my thumbs and waiting for you to call, but _no_ — you’re too busy going to brunches and meetings and taking the whole fucking city by storm like some kinda musical savior!” 

“Jesus, Lance, if you’re so miserable here, then just _leave_,” Keith erupts as he flings his arms out to either side. “Do something else. _Anything_. Something you _actually_ care about, even without your family’s stamp of approval.”

“No, that’s — that’s not what I want —”

“Then what _do_ you want, Lance! Make up your mind!”

His voice roars in the tiny space and forces Lance to back up several steps, as though he fears Keith might be able to hear the stutter of his pulse, how it bangs against his skull in sickening surprise.

“Look, we knew what we were getting ourselves into when we signed up for this, so quit acting like it’s my fault,” Keith goes on, frantic and reckless, like tumbling down a hillside. The angle of his scowl is a treacherous thing to behold. His eyes flash, frighteningly black. “You can’t keep doing this. You can’t keep blaming me every time things get hard, Lance, and you can’t keep trying to make me feel like shit about living my life just because you don’t know what the _hell_ you’re doing with yours.”

He seems to realize his mistake as soon as he says it, as soon as it slices viciously out of his lungs, except by then it’s too late. It’s already out there, eclipsing the silence, and Lance’s face looks pale and empty. Moments pass — long, gut-dropping moments — while Lance waits for the inevitable hurt to dig in its claws, but he isn’t sure if it ever will. He’s never felt this before; a devastation so cruel, so acute, that it feels like nothing at all. Just a dull, gnawing numbness in the center of his chest.

“Lance,” says Keith, scratched raw from all the shouting. His body language is shriveled and ashamed. “…Lance.” 

Lance recoils with a rough jerk when Keith reaches for him, imploringly, fingertips just barely grazing his elbow. Tears prickle behind Lance’s eyes, but he doesn’t even notice them spilling onto his cheeks until the room goes blurry around him. Even Keith’s features are all glossy and distorted as he just stands here in the kitchen, inches away instead of miles. Close enough to touch. Closer than he’s been in weeks.

And yet Lance has never felt farther away from him.

“This isn’t working,” he whispers. 

Keith continues to stare, paralyzed in place. “…What.”

Lance breathes, but it’s audible in an embarrassing way. A small snivel of sound. “Come on, don’t —” he grunts, rubbing his knuckles under his lashes. “—don’t do that. Don’t act like everything’s fine when—” 

“Lance,” Keith says again, desperately, as he takes a clumsy step forward. “I —”

His phone, still clutched in his hand, cries out — _ringing, blaring_ — and Keith’s entire face screws up like it’s a physical knifepoint in his gut. 

Lance’s gaze hardens to steel. “Answer it,” he orders, low. 

“I don’t —”

“Answer your _fucking_ phone, Keith.”

Nothing happens for a while; nothing except for a delayed ache cutting into Lance’s ribcage, tearing him open and fraying his edges to tattered little shreds. He wants to reach inside himself and wring his heart to a pulp until the pain is gone.

Eventually, the ringing stops.

“Lance,” Keith pleads, one final time.

“Better go catch your plane,” is all Lance gets out, a bitter bite in his tone that wasn’t there before. “You’ve got a life to go live, don’t you, rockstar?” 

Screaming would be easier, he thinks, perhaps a bit belatedly. It would be callous and cold, but at least it would be over quick. It wouldn’t linger like Keith does now, for a moment, with his brow creased and his jaw clenched, before he’s ducking his head and making for the door.

That’s the part that hurts the most, in the end: he doesn’t look back. He doesn’t even have the decency to glance at the mess he’s leaving behind, or the guts to turn around and watch Lance cry. He just leaves, quietly, a silencer on his gun. 

And then, in the blink of an eye, he’s gone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ending the chapter on a tearful note, but you know what that means -- OUR RESOLUTION/HAPPY ENDING IS COMING UP NEXT!! Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me this far. Thank you, thank you. 
> 
> Before anyone jumps to any conclusions, please keep in mind that the story isn't over yet! There's still a lot to learn/understand about the boys' situations and how things ended up the way they did. Can't wait to share it all in the final chapter!! 
> 
> [FIC PLAYLIST](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0CROuZs0SFw5RSegp8oaFD?si=JarhPTeiS-uyNniJSuhEag)
> 
> [TWITTER](https://twitter.com/starlightment)  
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	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: there is minor character death in this chapter. It's not graphic in any way, but it is alluded to, and I don't want anyone to be completely blindsided, in case it's something that could potentially upset or unsettle.

**. . .**

**now.**

Lance is out of breath and out of luck by the time he makes it to Keith’s apartment building on 62nd. It doesn’t seem to matter how hard he prays or jams his thumb into the buzzer; Keith is not answering. This would be a total non-issue if only Lance had kept his spare set of keys, but he pitched those into the garbage a long time ago, along with every other Keith-related item he could scrounge up. 

Back then he thought that destroying the evidence would conceal the crime, like Keith’s bloody fingerprints weren’t already a permanent stain on his heart. Like the smell of smoke wouldn’t linger after smothering the flames.

He didn’t know anything back then.

He knows so much more now, and yet understands so little.

“Keith!” shouts Lance, stepping away from the door and craning his neck all the way back. “Keith, c’mon!”

A few neighbors shout back at him in a chorus of disgruntled curses, but Lance is far too riled up to worry about causing a scene. He glares up at Keith’s fourth-story window, where there’s a light on. Then he surges forward and slams his entire palm into the buzzer this time. It lets out a hideous, sustained shriek. 

It takes almost ten whole seconds before Keith throws his window open and leans out of it. Lance’s hand recoils, lightning-quick. Keith looks unimpressed.

“Real mature.”

“I just wanna talk,” Lance gets out in a hurry, only for Keith to duck back into his apartment a moment later. “No-no-no, wait — oh, this son of a — _Keith!”_

He kicks the toe of his shoe against the concrete, frustrated, but not defeated. No sooner is he diving for the buzzer again than the door swings open to his left, and then there’s Keith looming in the doorway, dressed in sweats and a white t-shirt that fits him in all the right places. When Lance takes in the sight of him, his breath seizes painfully, pulse thick in his skull.

Keith’s mouth lifts bitterly on one side. “Now you wanna talk,” he grumbles.

“Yeah,” says Lance. “We’ve been kinda long overdue for that, don’t you think?”

Silence. Keith is as rigid as a stone-faced mannequin. 

“Real bad time to go all angsty on me, man,” Lance mutters. “Any thoughts? Opinions? Something _close_ to resembling an emotion?”

Keith still doesn’t move. Lance desperately wants to shake him, unroot him.

“Look, I promise that this whole thing has sucked for me just as much as it’s sucked for you — which, _yeah_, I’ll admit, is probably a little more than half my fault — so let’s just get to the bottom of it, once and for all, okay?” Lance sighs; a soft, whimper-like noise. “‘Cause I dunno about you, but I’m done. I’m just… so _done_ doing this with you, Keith.”

“Doing what?”

“Pretending that it’s really over between us.”

The blatant honesty of it takes Keith by such surprise that his expression finally bends. He glances away, hiding the fall of his brow, muttering, “You already made it pretty clear that you want it to be over.”

“Yeah, well, I was wrong,” Lance tells him at once. “Turns out I’ve been wrong about a lot of stuff, actually, so I’m sorta hoping you’ll help me set the record straight.”

Realization washes over Keith, and not in a good way. “You talked to Shiro, didn’t you.”

Lance shrugs, quick and defensive. “So I did some recon, sue me,” he says. “But it’s not like _you_ were willing to offer any insight.”

“I _tried_,” Keith hisses. “I came to the café all those mornings —”

“What, that? _That_ was trying?” says Lance, exasperated. “Pro tip, Keith: some people actually use _words_ to communicate things.”

“You’ve never given me the chance without snapping at me.”

“Funny, ‘cause the unanswered calls in my phone history kinda beg to differ.”

Keith’s face is suddenly livid, the tension between them strung so taut that Lance feels it vibrating in his teeth. “You’re not the only one who got hurt, Lance,” he fumes.

“I _know_, Keith, I got that part. But what I really _don’t_ get is why it took this long for me to find out about it,” Lance retaliates. “If you’re so torn up inside, then how come I had to spend a _whole friggin’ year_ thinking you had already moved on, huh?”

His words bring Keith to some kind of boiling point, visible in the flash of his canine when he snarls, the growl in his tone when he says, “_Fuck this_,” and stomps away toward the edge of the stoop.

But Lance is mad, too, so he whirls around, bracing himself. Part of him wants to pick a fight, but not about this; they’ve already wasted enough time doing that. Lance can’t deal with another screaming match. If they don’t work things out right now, then they never will. And that’s —

— Well, Lance can’t deal with that, either.

He’s scrambling for something to say right up until Keith turns around again, pinning Lance in place with intensely narrowed eyes. His shoulders are squared and his jaw is set, like he’s poised on a clifftop and about to leap into whatever lies below. 

“I never went back to LA,” he forces out, low, and Lance’s mouth parts a bit dumbly. “That weekend, after we — I didn’t go back. There was no point. I just… couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t be one of Kolivan’s pretty little show ponies. I couldn’t even _look_ at my guitar without thinking of you. You were _everywhere_, Lance. You were in every song I tried to write.” 

A warm shiver ripples through Lance, right down to the marrow of him. He circles his arms around his own middle and squeezes, as though it’ll keep him from splitting open, somehow. 

“So I quit,” Keith continues, “and went home. It was… bad. I didn’t want to think about anything or talk to anyone — not Shiro and Adam wondering how the trip went, not Kolivan trying to bribe me into coming back — but my phone just wouldn’t fucking _stop ringing_. All I wanted to do was run, and be _alone_.” He says nothing for a beat, holding Lance’s gaze with utmost seriousness. “I never thought you’d call, Lance. The way we ended things… I didn’t think you’d ever want to speak to me again.”

Lance hugs himself even tighter. “Then what happened?” he asks, hushed. 

“I,” says Keith, “threw my phone in front of a train.” And when Lance just gives him a slow, puzzled blink, he rushes to add, “Really, I — I was at the station, on my way home, and I saw it coming down the track, so I… uh.” Gradually, the absurdity of it dawns on him; Lance can see it playing out across his features like a film reel. Keith’s ears flush light pink, sheepish. “…I guess I kinda lost my temper a bit.” 

Something bubbles in Lance’s throat just then. It’s hot like bile, but it comes out like a laugh; a terrible one. He promptly slaps a hand over his mouth, horrified and helpless to the way even more of these deranged sounds keep slipping past his fingers, rattling his entire frame.

Keith glowers. “It’s not funny.”

“No, it’s not —” says Lance, panting and shaking. “—you’re right, it’s — _god_, it’s _really_ not, it’s just… _shit_.” His body heaves and, eventually, stills. “All that time I didn’t even think you cared.” 

“Of _course_ I cared,” Keith grunts at him, incredulous. “Jesus, Lance.”

“Well, _fine_, then maybe you should’ve actually done something about it, like — oh, I dunno — something involving a _ring_ might’ve been a real nice place to start.” The dangerous, stormy-eyed look that crosses Keith’s face has Lance backing up a few steps out of genuine fear. He says, “Uh. Yeah. Shiro mentioned that, too. Sorry?”

Keith twitches, like he’s restraining himself and doing a poor job at it. “I’m gonna murder him,” he grumbles darkly. 

“So is that why you…” Lance tries again, softer. “I mean, when you came to Boston, were you gonna…?”

Keith looks away, not answering — which maybe _is_ his answer. It’s enough of one for Lance, who is stuck standing here, processing, reeling, and stinging with regret.

A pause, heavy.

And then: “I would’ve said yes, y’know.”

Keith casts him a sidelong glare, his pitch dropping several octaves. “Don’t.” 

“I’m serious,” Lance goes on, anyway. “No matter what I said, or how pissed off I was, I still would’ve —”

“_Don’t_, Lance,” bursts Keith, bristling and angry now. “Just _don’t_. Marriage isn’t a bandaid. It wouldn’t have magically fixed all your problems or made you any happier or — or maybe just not in the way you wanted to be.”

Lance stares at Keith for a drawn-out moment, fixated on the bob of Keith’s throat when he swallows, the way his gaze turns to liquid, all sheen, as he unravels himself so vulnerably, so violently, in front of Lance.

“Back then it was like,” Keith says, voice going quiet and ragged, “you were always searching for something more. Something that you thought would make your life… bigger. _Better_.” His eyes glaze over once again, tears creeping closer to the tips of his lashes, but he doesn’t resist them this time. He lets them run thick trails down his cheeks, as if in surrender. “And I don’t know why you couldn’t ever find that with me.” 

“I could’ve,” says Lance, suddenly desperate. “I know I could’ve, but I just —”

“Then why did you end it?” Keith replies hotly. “Tell me, Lance, why the _hell_ did you —”

“I was — _fuck_ — I was scared, okay?” Lance bites out, practically spits it at the ground between their feet. He looks straight into Keith’s wet eyes and tells him, slowly, earnestly, “You scared the ever-loving _crap_ out of me, Keith. And I couldn’t stop thinking it was only a matter of time before you’d just… wake up one day and realize how pathetic I am. Y’know? That — that maybe I wasn’t good enough for you anymore, ‘cause maybe I’d _never_ be good enough, but — but _you_… it was like you already knew exactly where you were going, and what you wanted.”

In an instant, Keith has Lance’s face cupped in the palm of his hand, and Lance latches onto his wrist in return, inhaling sharp. He hadn’t even noticed that they’d been standing close enough to touch, but now that they are, he can’t imagine letting go. 

“The only thing I ever knew I wanted,” says Keith, devout and whisper-soft, breathing conviction into every syllable, “was you, Lance.” 

Lance’s eyes slip shut, the world around him dipping dizzily. “I wish you would’ve told me that,” he murmurs through numb lips.

“Yeah,” Keith admits, forlornly, as he swipes his thumb across Lance’s freckled cheek. “Me, too.”

They’re even closer now, foreheads pressed together, while the thumb of Keith’s other hand grazes back and forth over Lance’s knuckles, but besides that, Keith doesn’t make a move. He’s waiting, Lance realizes. He’s waiting for Lance to give him permission.

And Lance feels like maybe he’s just about to when his phone rings.

His brain stutters to a stop, eyes shooting open. “Uh, I’m —” He’s suddenly and viscerally aware of all the places where they’re locked and laced around one another, and it shocks him bad enough that he stumbles backwards, out of Keith’s personal space. “—sorry, I’m just gonna…”

“Yeah,” says Keith, who also steps away, wiping his sweaty palm on the backside of his pants. “Yeah, sure. Go do that.”

Lance’s belly is still buzzing by the time he wrestles his phone from his pocket, checks the caller ID, and answers with an agitated huff.

“Rach, this better be good,” he mumbles into the phone. 

“Hey,” his sister says, the hitch in her voice so jarring that Lance can already tell something’s off. “Where are you right now?”

“I’m, uh —” says Lance, glancing over at Keith, then at the pavement. “—where are _you?_ What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Rachel breathes loudly on the other end. “Yeah, no, I’m fine. It’s not me.” She hesitates, and Lance’s blood starts curdling into sheer panic before she can even finish. “It’s Lita.” 

* * *

“I was beginning to wonder if you’d show up.”

Lance steps into the room, which is starkly white from floor to ceiling, and looks over to where Estela is resting in bed in a papery hospital gown. She’s pale beneath the harsh fluorescents, almost tinged grey, but she’s smiling — _thank god she’s smiling_ — and Lance tries to focus on that instead of the oxygen cannula under her nose, all the monitors and IVs they have her hooked up to.

“Had to make a quick pit stop,” he explains, lifting both hands; a to-go coffee in one and a small pastry box in the other. “Figured you might already need a break from whatever crap they feed you here.”

“Is that —”

“Honey cinnamon latte, extra hot, and a blueberry scone,” says Lance. “Made with love, of course.”

Estela tips her head back, laughing delightedly. “Hah! Now, see?” she crows. “I knew you were my favorite grandkid for a reason.”

“Thought you weren’t allowed to say stuff like that,” Lance teases.

“Ah, well,” says Estela, unbothered. She lays a hand to her chest, the rise and fall of it beginning to slow, recovering from her outburst. “You’re allowed to say whatever you want when you’re dying.”

The room goes excruciatingly silent, except for the falter of Lance’s breath as it catches in his windpipe like barbed wire. He stares at her, dumbfounded. “That’s not funny, Lita.”

Her smile drifts askew, but doesn’t fade. “Come here,” she says, voice gentle. “Sit with me.”

He moves closer, feeling as if he’s tightrope walking over a chasm so large that he dares not look down at it. Every stride is a struggle for balance, an inch away from uncertainty. As soon as the coffee and pastry are set aside and Lance settles on the edge of the bed, Estela covers his hands with her own.

“Niño,” she tells him calmly, evenly, “I’m very sick.”

Lance immediately shakes his head. “No,” he grits out.

“I’m sick,” she says again, “and the doctors don’t think that I’ll —”

“No… _no_, you —” he says, fumbling the words all over the place, and when he opens his mouth to speak again, there’s nothing left; nothing but a broken, garbled sound from the deepest pit of his chest. “—you can’t, _please_, you — not now, not like this —”

“Ay, mi cariñito, slow down,” whispers Estela. “Not like what?”

Lance’s heart shudders behind the cage of his ribs. He hadn’t planned on telling her this way, but: “I have to sell the café,” he reveals, and then starts crying for real. It’s too much, all at once — the guilt, the sorrow, the shame — and so he sinks forward, doubled over at the waist, sobbing hard into their clasped hands. “I’m sorry, Lita, I’m so sorry —”

She reaches for him, a palm flat to his damp cheek, pulling him to the surface again. “I don’t care about any of that,” she says firmly.

“But I do,” chokes Lance. “This was the only thing I had left. My one shot to be something other than a drop-out, to — to do something with my life that… that actually _matters_.” Then he says, watery and barely audible, “I wanted to make you proud of me.” 

“And you don’t think I’m already proud of you?” Estela challenges him. “Hm? For being the strong, kindhearted man you are today?” A stray tear dribbles past Lance’s waterline, making it as far as his freckles before Estela wipes it away. “My sweet boy. Always too hard on yourself… You don’t have to move mountains, niño. You don’t have to be the greatest, or the richest, or the most celebrated — that’s not what matters. Look at me.” 

Lance lifts his chin, with aching lungs and quivering lips, his eyes prickling anew.

“Sometimes the most precious parts of life, niño, are almost too small to see, even when they’re right in front of you,” she says, carding her fingers through his choppy bangs, “but that doesn’t make them any less _extraordinary_. Just a little bit of syrup and honey, remember? That’s all you need to make it extra sweet.”

“I don’t —” rasps Lance. He glances down at her other hand, studying the veins and wrinkles running along her skin, and realizes just how fragile she looks, in this moment. It scares him more than anything else ever has. “—I don’t know what I’m gonna do without you.” 

“Then I’ll tell you,” says Estela, undeterred and unafraid. “You’re going to be sad, for a while, but you won’t feel like that forever. Alright? You won’t. You’re going to live your life, and it’s going to be a long one, filled with so much happiness. Just like mine. You understand?”

Lance nods.

“You have to promise me, niño,” she insists, “because _that_ is what truly matters. That is what will make me even more proud, if you promise me that you’ll be happy.” 

Lance somehow finds the strength within him to nod one more time.

“I promise.”

* * *

The funeral service is held that weekend, on a gloomy August afternoon. It’s tedious and awful — all the tearful condolences from friends and neighbors and distant relatives Lance only ever sees on holidays, having to huddle with his siblings under a black umbrella as their abuela’s casket sinks deeper into the earth — and Estela probably would’ve just rolled her eyes at the whole production.

_Let’s skip the hymns and get right to the cake_, is what she might’ve said. Lance can imagine it so clearly, along with her signature red-lipped grin, that it makes him laugh inappropriately right in the middle of a prayer. 

It also makes him miss her so bad he can barely breathe.

People take turns kneeling at the foot of Estela’s grave, whispering their goodbyes and leaving behind colorful bouquets. Lance watches them come and go in blurry succession, but can’t bring himself to do the same. He slumps down to the muddy ground, ruining the seat of his nicest slacks. His mother will surely scold him for it later, as if the biggest tragedy of today is an extra trip to the dry cleaners. 

He sits there for a while, alone and in silence, until a gentle hand falls onto his shoulder. 

“Hey,” says Keith, crouching down beside him. His face looks just as stiff and stoic as it did earlier, when Lance caught an accidental glimpse of him and Shiro seated near the back of the church, their heads bowed respectfully. “I told your mom I’d take you home. That okay?”

Lance nods weakly.

“I’ll go wait by your car,” Keith tells him. “Take as much time as you need.”

Keith leaves without another word, giving Lance his privacy, which Lance greatly appreciates. He’s been pulling the vise-grip on his heart a few notches too tight, spending most of today with a damp spot on his lapel from all the loved ones he let cry in his arms, but his own eyes have been dry since this morning. If he’s going to have another breakdown, then he’d prefer to do it where not too many people can see. 

When the sound of Keith’s footsteps disappear in the breeze, Lance lets himself come undone a little bit. He gazes out at the cemetery, at the grey clouds overhead, at the winding rows of grey headstones. Everything surrounding him is painted the same bleak, ghostly shade, and he can’t tell whether it’s all in his head or if that’s just how the world is supposed to look now that Lita isn’t in it. He rips up handful after handful of grass until there’s dirt caked under his nails, until his fingertips are cold and thoroughly roughed up.

Lance doesn’t keep track of how long he stays out there, but it must be a considerable while because Keith looks like he’s made himself comfortable on the hood of Lance’s car, elbows leaning on his bent knees and his blazer strewn over his lap. He perks up when he hears Lance trudging across the lawn, his features pinched with concern.

“Ready?” he asks.

Lance tosses him the keys and plops heavily into the passenger seat. “Let’s just go.”

The drive is mostly quiet; another unintentional courtesy on Keith’s part. Lance wishes he could nap the whole way, but his eyes feel like they’re tethered to the misty horizon, the eerie glow of the car’s headlights, the tiny specks of rain dotting the windshield. Something swells in his gut as the miles slip away under them. They’re minutes from Lance’s neighborhood, his childhood home, where Lita no longer lives or laughs or sings. Her spot in the garden is empty and overgrown. Her hair pins and curlers, untouched. All her treasures, and knick-knacks, and everything she’s ever owned has been sealed away in her room like a tomb.

And the more Lance thinks about it, the more impossible it becomes to stifle his grief, but he tries, anyway, to bury it into his palm so that Keith won’t notice.

“Don’t take me home,” Lance finally mutters as they round his street corner, that familiar line of brownstone townhouses coming into view. “I-I know it’s selfish, okay, I know it’s _fucking selfish_ of me to say that right now, but I need to be anywhere that’s not here, ‘cause I _can’t_ —”

Keith brings the car to a halt at the same time he brings his hand onto Lance’s thigh, and every system in Lance’s body reacts like a machine booting down. It grounds him, that touch; makes him feel steady in ways that he wasn’t before, or maybe never has been, without Keith.

“Just tell me where to go.”

.

.

.

.

Walking into Keith’s apartment is just as surreal as it was the last time. The place still feels like a bated breath, like a part of it’s been carved out, but then, so does Lance. It doesn’t stop him from going. Doesn’t stop him from scrubbing himself pink in the shower, or from slipping into the change of clothes that Keith has laid out for him, or from sinking into the bed, with Kosmo at his back and the warm, woodsy smell of Keith’s pillowcase in his nose.

Through the clutter in his brain, Lance can recall the feeling of being pinned to this very bed, of being held close and kissed senseless under beams of summer sunlight, lush and glorious against his skin.

And that, eventually, is what lulls him to sleep. 

* * *

Music laps at the sides of Lance’s unconsciousness, waking him slowly. He’s been tossing and turning for hours, but this is the first time he wakes without a start, without tears, without a sense of dread or despair gripping him by the throat like an angry fist.

Instead, it’s something else: a feeling so deep-rooted, so intricately woven into the fabric of Lance’s soul, that he can’t be entirely certain it’s not a dream.

“Keith?”

There’s no response, no shift in the shadows, and no warm body pressed against his own. As he reaches out to graze the empty space beside him, his eyes are drawn to a sliver of light pouring in from the half-open door, where Kosmo must’ve nosed himself out earlier in the night. It stretches across the floorboards like spilled ink, long and pale. 

Curiosity stirs in Lance’s bones, beckoning him, so he climbs out of bed with a blanket still draped around his shoulders and moves dazedly toward the light.

With every step, the music grows louder.

His heart, even more so.

Lance follows the sound over to the open window and spots Keith sitting out there, on the fire escape, silhouetted under a blood-orange dawn. He’s cradling an old mahogany acoustic, eyes closed as he works its strings into the sort of wistful melody that could bring Lance to his knees, if he isn’t careful.

Then again, Lance thinks, he’s already fallen for Keith once before.

He fell, headstrong and headfirst, and not a single moment of it had been careful — because neither of them are boys with quiet hearts, who know how to love things without bruising themselves up a bit — but Lance’s skin is getting a little tougher, so what’s another scar, anyway.

He inches infinitesimally closer, lightheaded with want, and thinks: what’s just one more, now that all the bad ones are beginning to heal.

“Hey,” Lance croaks.

The music stops abruptly, like a spell being broken. “Hey,” says Keith, twisting at the neck and blinking in Lance’s direction. “You’re up.”

“You’re playing again.”

Keith pauses, then exhales all at once. “Yeah.”

Lance scrapes his teeth over his bottom lip, hesitating. “So, um,” he mumbles awkwardly. “Mind if I sit with you?”

“You —” says Keith, and he startles again, shimmying himself backwards to make room on the metal platform. “Of course I don’t.” 

The bottom of the blanket pools out around Lance as he sits down next to Keith, legs pulled into his chest. His gaze lowers to the wet, moon-drenched city below, distracting himself from the fact that Keith is itching at the corner of his vision, and he’s so unspeakably good-looking — even at this hour, up close, with his hair an uncombed mess and a wild blaze of insomnia flaring behind his eyes — unlike Lance, who probably just looks raw and haggard.

“I don’t wanna talk about yesterday,” he warns, because he can feel it hanging in the air between them like the aftermath of a summer storm. “In case you were thinking about going there.”

“I wasn’t,” says Keith, “but, uh. Noted.”

“Y’know what’s kinda messed up, though? I mean, like, _besides_…” Lance makes a vague, sweeping gesture with his hand before letting it flop back down. He sighs, “All our blabbering about the past, and I still haven’t even apologized for any of it.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Let me, okay?” snaps Lance, adamant. “Just let me try to do something right for once.”

Keith steels his jaw against another protest, hardening his mouth into a firm line.

“What you said to me the other day, about… about how I was always searching for something,” Lance begins breathlessly. He turns at last to give Keith his gaze, pupils blown and glossy. “I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I thought it’d be obvious when I found it — thought if I could just prove something to myself, or my family, and live up to all their crazy expectations, then maybe I’d feel better — but now, when I look back, it’s like… it was _you_. God, Keith, it was —”

Keith’s expression crumples, devastated.

“—the way you loved me, the way we loved each other, _that_ — that was the most incredible thing in my life,” confesses Lance, throat hot, shoulders trembling. “And I’m sorry I didn’t see that. I’m sorry for getting so lost in my own stupid head that I couldn’t even fucking _see_ —”

“I’m sorry, too,” Keith interjects hoarsely. “For leaving.”

Lance shoves his nose into the blanket, mops at it where it’s gone runny and damp. “I didn’t exactly make it very easy for you to stay.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Keith scowls, his whole face twisted, as though he’s in pain. “I walked away when you needed me most, Lance,” he says, “but I won’t do that again.”

“Easy there, Kogane,” Lance whispers, overwhelmed, smiling only slightly. “Keep saying things like that and you’ll really be stuck with me for good this time.” 

“I hope so,” Keith whispers back.

Lance lays his cheek flat against the tops of his knees and looks at Keith, how the glow of daybreak limns him in gold like he’s made of the stuff.

“You can keep playing,” he says, “if you want.”

Keith does. He plays, and Lance listens, and they both watch as the dawn of a brand new morning rises up to greet them.

* * *

The next time Lance wakes, the only music he hears is that of clattering pans and sizzling bacon. He doesn’t remember dozing off after watching the sunrise, or dragging himself back into Keith’s room, for that matter, but when Lance opens his eyes to the hazy daylight, that’s exactly where he is.

Warm. Safe. At ease.

As soon as he shuffles into the kitchen, Kosmo hurries over to greet him with a wagging tail and slobbery tongue. Lance relishes in the attention for a bit, then happens to notice Keith standing by the counter in a pair of plaid boxers, his grin dimpled and fond.

It hits Lance right between the ribs.

“Morning,” he says. “There’s breakfast, in case you’re hungry.”

Lance cuts a look to the left, where Keith’s tiny kitchenette table has already been set for two. His stomach rumbles and his chest flutters. “Thanks,” he says.

“Coffee’s all you, though,” Keith tells him. “I can never fix it the way you like.”

“That’s ‘cause _you’re_ not the expert around here, hotshot,” says Lance, sidling over to the coffee maker and bumping Keith aside with his hip. “_Scoot_.” 

Keith bumps him back, chuckling, and they both spend a brief, stupidly indulgent moment smiling at each other before Keith goes to take a seat at the table. It feels effortless and startling in equal measure.

“Shouldn’t you be at work or something?” Lance wonders, grabbing some milk from the fridge. 

“I’m taking the day off.”

“You? Day off?” says Lance, skeptical. “Okay. Weird, but okay.”

“Is it really so weird that I wanna spend time with you?” 

Lance hums as he stirs his coffee, feigning contemplation. “Well, when you put it like _that_,” he drawls, and brings his mug with him to the table. “Guess I _am_ a pretty fun guy to be around.”

Keith chuckles again. “You seem better today.”

“Better?”

“I mean, more like yourself.”

“Oh,” says Lance, like he’s not quite sure what to say next.

Like, when he woke up this morning, there’d been something lovely growing up through the cracks of his heart like ivy, and he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from until he saw Keith smiling at him in the kitchen.

Peering down at his breakfast, Lance twirls his fork into a clump of scrambled eggs, then goes, “Well. Can’t be sad forever, right?”

Keith props an elbow onto the tabletop, and tilts his chin into the heel of his palm, as a newer, smaller, much _softer_ grin catches around his lips. “Right,” he echoes.

Heat blooms under Lance’s skin, his cheeks flushed and full of half-chewed food. “Keith.”

A distracted grunt is all he gets in reply.

He rips off a chunk of bacon crust and chucks it at Keith’s face. “_Dude_,” he admonishes again, high and embarrassed.

“What?” says Keith. The bacon chunk bounces off his nose and falls to the floor for Kosmo to gobble up eagerly. “What am I doing?” 

“Looking at me,” groans Lance, flustered, “like _that_. Like... how you used to.”

Keith’s grin quickly melts into a frown.

“Which isn’t a bad thing!” Lance squawks. “Seriously, it’s not, it’s just — it’s been a while since we’ve… y’know. _Done this._” An anxious beat. “We — We are, aren’t we? Doing this? Like, as in…?”

Keith knits his eyebrows together. “_Yes_,” he says, sounding affronted about it.

“Cool, cool, cool,” Lance blurts, rubbing at the back of his neck when it begins to burn hotter. “Just double-checking.”

“Lance,” sighs Keith. “I told you how I feel, and I wasn’t kidding.” 

“I know — and neither was I, FYI — but I’m just saying,” Lance rambles on, “that it’s kinda been a crazy couple days. A lot’s changed, and I don’t just mean in general. _We’ve_ changed, too.”

Keith nods solemnly. “Yeah.”

“And the last thing I wanna do is screw this up again.”

“Obviously.”

“Awesome. Same page, then. _Soooo_,” says Lance, “maybe that means we oughta… go a teeny bit slower this time. Ease back into it, yeah? I mean, as long as you got me, and I got you, then what’s the big rush for, anyway? Sounds pretty sensible of us, right?”

“Right.”

“And _mature_.”

“Definitely mature.”

“Right!” Lance chirps, slapping his hand against the table to imitate the bang of a gavel. “So it’s settled. Bada-bing, bada-boom. Look at us. Our first official decree as boyfriends, version 2.0.”

Keith huffs with quiet amusement. “Need more coffee?” he asks, reaching for his own mug.

“Nah, I’m good.”

Another shared smile. Keith rises from his seat.

Or, he _almost_ does, except that Lance snags him by the wrist before he can fully straighten, catching him halfway, awkwardly hunched over the table. Lance swallows, dry-mouthed. Keith’s gaze is a little bewildered as it bores into Lance, but mostly it’s just dark and dousing and makes him look completely amenable to all of Lance’s whims, like he’d go anywhere and everywhere, no matter the risk; wherever Lance’s grasp decides to lead him. 

“So,” Lance says, then clears his throat when his voice comes out too airy and thin. “Okay, so, maybe not… _that_ slow.” 

The moment, their resolve, this delicate little thread that’s been keeping them trussed a tentative distance away from each other — it all _snaps_.

Keith takes a staggering step forward at the same time Lance springs up, chair scraping out behind him and toppling over. They collide somewhere in the middle, sealing their mouths in a deep, savage kiss. Lance whines into it, grappling frantically for Keith and finding fistfuls of hair, endless planes of muscle spanning the width of his bulky shoulders.

“I missed you,” Keith gasps, his hands greedy as he runs them up and down Lance’s hips. He sounds utterly wrecked. “Lance. I missed you so much.”

Lance breaks their kiss, separating with a soft, wet noise, and looks Keith over. Every detail. Every little rush of rediscovery: his bushy, unplucked brow. The angle of his jaw, faintly shadowed and in need of a shave. His cupid’s bow, the rosiness of his kiss-swollen lips. That barely-crooked tooth near the front of his mouth, overlapping onto its neighbor. 

It’s all right here. Right in front of him.

“Fucking hell, babe,” says Lance, deliriously, euphorically, “you have _no_ idea.” 

* * *

**epilogue.**

When Lance thinks back on it — now, seven years later, boasting the sort of retrospective wisdom that only comes with age and time — it kind of makes total sense that everything always seems to lead him right back to the same place: _here_.

_Here_ is Estela’s Coffee Bar, the very first café-slash-music-lounge this city has ever seen, where musicians and caffeine-junkies alike flock in enthusiastic droves since the day they first opened their doors.

The idea, ultimately, had been Keith’s. He’s the one who encouraged Lance to go through with signing the papers and giving Shiro full-access to the coffee shop — given a few non-negotiable conditions, of course. Knocking down the wall that once stood between the two establishments was the first order of business, followed by redecorating and rebranding and a whole lot of reconciling.

A year and a half after that, Lance found himself with zero debt, joint ownership of Manhattan’s trendiest new hangout, and a hunky new husband to thank for it. 

Sometimes, even now, even when he’s sticky with caramel and covered in steam burns up to his wrists, he still can’t believe it’s real. And _his_. 

But then an exuberant, “Papa!” cries out across the room, accompanied by the tinkling bell above the door. That, too, is real and his. Lance beams, brighter than a beacon, as his daughter, Lily, in all her pint-sized glory, comes skittering around the counter and pounces at him.

“Hey, there’s my girl!” says Lance, scooping her up with one arm, peppering her face in a bunch of noisy, smacking kisses until she kicks and squeals giddily. “You have a nice music lesson with Daddy?”

Lily nods so hard that she dishevels her braid, which already appears to be a bit loose and misshapen in the first place; Keith’s best attempt, bless him. “I played the alphabet song all on my own,” she informs him proudly. “And Daddy taught me new chords! A and G!”

“Not surprised,” Lance snickers, mostly to himself. “Daddy knows _all_ about G-strings.”

He hears his husband utter a long-suffering groan in response. Keith makes his way behind the counter, guitar case slung over his back, looking just as chiseled and dreamy as the day they met. It sends an electric tickle down Lance’s spine, feeling Keith nudge up behind him, how he makes a point of pressing his grinning mouth to Lance’s nape and whispers, “One day she’ll be old enough to understand your dumb jokes, you know.”

“Who’s joking?”

He rolls his eyes, but it’s such a practiced move, so warmed with affection, that Lance has to chuckle again. “I’m gonna get things set up for tonight,” says Keith. He leaves a kiss on Lance’s neck, and another on the tip of Lily’s nose before he starts heading toward the stage.

“Make it snappy, rockstar,” Lance reminds him with a wink. “Wouldn’t wanna keep your fans waiting.”

A pair of small, impatient hands tug on the straps of his apron. “Papa, can I stay and watch Daddy play?”

“‘Course, Lil,” says Lance, then leans in close like he’s sharing a secret. “But first… how would _you_ like to be my special helper?”

“Yeah!”

_Here_, Lance thinks, is home.

Here, where the air is sweet with the scent of Hunk’s pastries. Where there’s laughter and happiness and _magic_ abound — the very same kind that Lita used to weave into these walls. There’s bustle and amicable chatter as Romelle, Allura, and Acxa flit about, filling patrons’ cups with the most delicious brew in town. Here, where, later tonight, Keith will take the stage and mesmerize the crowd, and Lance will fall in love with him a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times over because that flame will never burn out. 

And right here, where his daughter sits on the marbled countertop, with a bottle of piloncillo syrup and a concentrated little furrow between her eyes that she undoubtedly inherited from her other father. 

Lance chuckles, covering her tiny hands with his own larger, more experienced ones as he guides her through the motions, drizzling strands of golden brown over fluffy foam — _up, down, criss-cros_s — until it’s just right.

“Remember, cariño, just a little bit of syrup and honey,” he tells her, brushing an unruly curl out of her eyes. “That’s all you need to make it extra sweet.”

_Here_, Lance thinks again, is the very best part of his life.

And, god, is it _extraordinary_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, folks, for going on this journey with me! I understand that exes-to-lovers isn't everyone's cup of tea, so I truly appreciate you taking a chance on this story. It does center around a break-up, yes, but it's also about healing and learning to love the life you have instead of the life you THINK you should have. That's a lesson that my own grandmother was amazing enough to teach me before she passed, and I keep it very near to my heart, always. :) 
> 
> Anyway, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING!! I have a couple other fics currently in the works, so if you'd like, you're more than welcome to follow me on twitter and/or tumblr for updates about those. 
> 
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